It is no mystery that acquiring organs can be difficult. Organ donation starts off with the person performing a simple act of consent to be a donor in their state's donor registry. While the process is simple, patients needing these donated organs have to wait in line. And the waiting can take months if not years. 3D printing may be an alternative and much affordable solution.
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have found a way to improve organ needs. The researchers purchased an ordinary one thousand dollar consumer type 3D printer and hacked it into printing soft raw materials. If we can print chairs, we can probably print organs, Discovery reports.
Adam Feinberg, has released a press statement, that they have been able to take MRI images of coronary arteries and 3D heart images and produced a 3D bioprint of each with astounding resolution and quality using collagen-like soft materials. The associate professor of the Materials Science and Engineering and Biomedical Engineering at CMU said that this will transform medical applications and solutions. Jim Garrett, the Dean of Engineering at CMU says that we should expect to see 3D bioprinting to continue to grow as an important medical application.
While 3D printing a chair may be easy, it's not so easy when it comes to using soft materials. The tendency of soft substances when printed is that it collapses on itself when printed in air. To get around this, the team developed a gel bath that will assist the weight of the soft material while being printed layer by layer. The gel, called FRESH (freeform reversible embedding of suspended hydrogels), can be melted away by heating to body temperature which does not damage the 3D bioprint. The 3D bioprint has biological molecules and living cells when printed.
While the project is still being further studied, the team is not too far away. They are now working on incorporating heart cells to 3D structures.
Bioprinting is not a new method in the scientific medical field but the team at CMU has been able to develop the application on a consumer 3D printer costing them a few thousand dollars or less. Now, compare that to the few hundred thousand dollar 3D bio printers that's already available to the public. To add, the software and hardware the team used is open sourced.
Patients waiting in line for heart donors can breathe a little easier. The CMU team is planning to release their 3D printer designs under an open source license.