Bioengineering 3d printing

How Is 3D Printing Changing Biomedical Engineering?

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Medical fields are always looking for innovation. In other industries, new technologies can help companies earn more money, but in medicine, they can save lives. Many recent advancements have pushed medicine forward, but 3D printing is particularly promising.

3D printing, also called additive manufacturing, hasn’t been around for long but has already shown tremendous potential. This technology has enabled manufacturers and hobbyists alike to produce parts quickly and cheaply. As printing methods and materials advance, these benefits can apply to biomedical engineering as well.

Additive manufacturing has already seen implementation in biomedical engineering, and it has the potential to disrupt the entire field. Here’s how.

More Affordable Bionics and Prosthetics

High costs are one of the most significant issues across all medical fields. Cutting-edge treatments and technologies are typically expensive, which can prevent many patients from accessing the best health care. This issue is especially poignant in prosthetics and bionics, where only 15% of American amputees can cover the cost of a prosthesis.

Additive manufacturing is far faster and uses less material than traditional techniques. As a result, it can produce the same products at a fraction of the cost. A 3D-printed prosthetic hand could cost as little as $50, whereas a traditional one could run for thousands of dollars.

As technology advances, these machines can work faster and print with a wider variety of materials. Prosthesis companies could produce artificial limbs that fit a range of needs and desires at a drastically reduced cost. More amputees could access resources that would make their lives easier.

3D-Printed Organs

While most additive manufacturing applications deal with plastic filaments, that’s not all the technology can do. A subset called bioprinting prints with biomaterials like cells. This process can create artificial organs that look, feel and behave like real ones, which could revolutionize organ transplants.

Traditional artificial organs can be expensive, like traditionally manufactured prosthetics. Many patients rely on human transplants, but this involves long waitlists, and 17 people a day die while waiting. Since bioprinting can produce organs much faster, it can reduce these wait times, saving lives.

Another issue with traditional transplants is compatibility. While modern medicine has substantially improved success rates, 10%-15% of patients’ bodies will reject a transplant. Bioprinting can produce replacement organs from patients’ own cells, creating a perfect genetic match. Transplant rejections could become a thing of the past with this technology.

Accessible Hands-On Training

No matter how advanced medical technology is, its efficacy depends on medical professionals’ ability to use it. Providing robust training for medical staff will always be crucial, and 3D printing can help. Medical schools and hospitals can use cutting-edge printing techniques to fashion remarkably lifelike models of organs, tissues and bodies, providing better training resources.

Practicing or observing operations on human patients may be the most effective method, but this can be inaccessible or dangerous, especially for students with less experience. Bioprinting provides the next best thing. It could give med students lifelike artificial organs to practice on, offering them the benefits of live-patient training without the risks.

Since bioprinting works so quickly and affordably, these resources would be more accessible. Med schools could establish innovation districts where students get hands-on experience with their education, helping them learn and become hospital-ready earlier.

Improved Disease Research

Disease research can be a complicated field. There are so many variables involved between patients that it can be near-impossible to predict how a patient might respond to a condition. 3D printing can help in this area, too. Research centers can bioprint replica organs and disease cells like cancers, observing how they interact in a laboratory environment.

Testing experimental treatments on human patients can be dangerous. By bioprinting disease cells and host organs, researchers can see how potential treatments fare without putting a human patient at risk. By the time they move to human trials, they would have much greater confidence in the procedure’s efficacy.

A 2017 study found that doctors can identify potential side effects by testing a bioprinted replica of a patient’s organs. Since medical professionals now have the technology to print with patients’ cells, these replicas will respond similarly to the real patient. With this technique, doctors could test for and discover side effects before administering treatment, avoiding complications.

3D Printing Will Forever Change the Medical Field

3D printing has already disrupted the manufacturing industry, and it will likely do the same to biomedical engineering. This technology is still young and has yet to see widespread adoption, but its potential is too vast to ignore. As materials become more affordable and varied and bioprinting techniques advance, medical printing will take off.

When 3D printing sees higher adoption rates across hospitals, it will transform health care. From prosthetics to surgery to research, biomedical engineering will become more efficient, affordable and accessible. The medical field will save more lives and do so for less.

Emily Newton is the Editor-in-Chief of Revolutionized, a magazine exploring how innovations change our world. She has over 3 years’ experience writing articles in the industrial and tech sectors.

the contribution of 3D printing to Medicine

Since antiquity, Man has used materials available in nature to fix, repair or heal any damage to the body, after an impact, an accident, or whenever a disease manifest.

In Ancient Egypt mummies where found to have artificial eyes, ears, teeth, and noses; in China and India, body malformations were fixed or even reconstructed with waxes, glue, and fabric. With the last 50 years’ technological and scientific progress, it was possible to create impressive materials, from the most rudimental orthopaedic implants to the most advanced lab-made biomimetic materials. These allow for an increasing efficiency of Tissue Engineering therapeutics, a branch of Biomedical Engineering.
Among the more recent technologies we find 3D printing of prosthetics and biomaterials used in various medical specialties. But what can we expect from 3D printing in medicine?

What is 3D printing?

This kind of technology is based on a sci-fi-like concept. Through printing devices, it is possible to create anatomical structures that are compatible with the body, and depending on the type of material used, those structures can even integrate the living organism that is the human body.
3D-printed prosthetics and implants can be adapted in order to suit only one determined organism. The ability of creating something so personalised alone can decrease infection and rejection rates, naturally improving the function of the prosthetics or implant.

What are the applications of 3D printing in medicine?

Currently 3D-printed products can be used in neuro-, cardiac, orthopaedic, and maxillofacial surgeries, tissue engineering and indirect manufacturing of medical devices.

Recently, a group of scientists at the University of Tel-Aviv was able to create an artificial heart, printed off of biological materials. This organ was around 3 centimetres, comparable to a rat or rabbit heart, but failed to pump blood on its own. Nevertheless, many other attempts are still being made. If the team succeeds, we might be facing a revolution in the medical area. 3D printing might ease the shortage of organ donors and, at the same time, can allow the decrease in cost and the intrinsic difficulties in organ transplants.

In 2018 a group of Italian researchers was able to create blood vessels from biopolymers and biological cells. Albeit in an initial phase, this study and its progress can represent the possibility of using prosthetic blood vessels in cases of cardiac failure, improving the outcomes of surgical procedures and the health of millions of people!

Bone tissue reparation and 3D-printed bone implants are also a reality. By using biomaterials and laboratory-made structures to support these materials, it is possible to create anatomic bone structures that promote regeneration and bone growth in the human organism.

In the University of Wollongong, Australia, a group of researchers was able to print ears, by 3D printing. The use of these printed anatomic structures will be a great help, for example, to children who suffer from Micotia, a congenital ear deformation.

What is the future impact of the advance of 3D printing for humans?

This is, undoubtedly, a million-dollar question. What will be of us in a near future? Will each and every one of us have access to “spare parts” that can save us from sickness?
We believe so. The answer is always on the side of scientific research and technological development and, without a doubt, in the investment of governments and tech giants in this field. With the proper commitment to 3D printing, we will surely evolve so that the use of biologic organs and implants will be a reality for almost all human beings. There are, however, some limitations to this technology, as well as some moral questions…
Is it safe to create organs in a laboratory, with total confidence that the materials that make up those organs are completely innocuous for humans? We need to wait for this scientific research to develop, in order to have more data on it.
Is it morally acceptable to create living tissue in a lab? We believe so. Just like any other medical therapy recreated in a lab, the development of living tissue in a controlled environment may enable its own use to treat the sick with the added bonus of having biological materials in its composition – which can increase the effectiveness of this kind of therapy.
Will we become bionic? Well, 3D printing is a technique that allows using biological materials, which makes any organ or implant a person may need or have very similar to their own molecular structure. Therefore, no electronic components – in addition to the 3D-printed organs or implants – would be needed to achieve the desired effectiveness.

High performance 3D bioprinter could speed up drug development

06/08/2021 15:45

1839

Bookmark

UC San Diego Nanoengineers (UCSD, USA) developed a high-performance technology bioprinting, which allows you to print on a 3D printer with a record speed - with its help you can get a large batch of 96 samples of living human tissues within 30 minutes, reports press office of the Jacobs School of Engineering at UCSD. in detail technology is described in the magazine Biofabrication .

The technology will allow drug developers to quickly create large amounts of human tissue on which they could testing new drugs and weeding out failed trials earlier, focusing on more promising drugs. The researchers note that while their technology cannot eliminate animal testing, it can minimize failures that occur at this - preclinical - stage.

New technology competes with other 3D methods bioprinting is not only by permission - it allows you to print Real size 3D structures with complex microscopic characteristics, such as human liver cancer tissue containing network of blood vessels, but also in terms of speed. Printing one of these tissue samples takes about 10 seconds using this technology; printing the same sample by traditional methods will take few hours. In addition, you no longer need to manually transfer Samples one at a time from print platform to well plates for screening: on tablet with 96 holes (example in the photo) at once you can create a batch of samples - in just half an hour.

Reproducibility is another key feature of this work. The fabrics that this technology allows to obtain are are highly organized structures, so they can be easily reproduce for screening on an industrial scale, changing according to request properties, structure and function of tissues.

How technology works

To print tissue samples, researchers first create three-dimensional models of biological structures on a computer. These drawings can be obtained even with medical scans, therefore, they can be personalized to the patient's tissues. Then the computer cuts the model into two-dimensional images and transfers them to millions of microscopic mirrors. Every mirror digitally controlled to project patterns violet light with a wavelength of 405 nanometers, which is safe for cells, in the form of these pictures. Light patterns fall on solution containing live cell cultures and photosensitive polymers that harden when exposed to light. Enough quickly, layer by layer, a solid polymer frame is printed, which contains living cells that will grow and form biological tissue.

The digitally controlled micromirror array is the key to high printer speed. Since it projects entire two-dimensional patterns when printed layer by layer, it creates three-dimensional structures are much faster than other printing methods, in which each layer is scanned line by line using a nozzle or laser.

[Photo: BIOFABRICATION]

Author Prepared by Tatyana Matveeva

3D printing 3D printer bioengineering bioprinting nanoengineering drug development 3D bioprinting

Source: jacobsschool.ucsd.edu

Information provided by the Information Agency "Scientific Russia". Mass media registration certificate: IA No. ФС77-62580, issued Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Communications on July 31, 2015.

SCIENCE FOR CHILDREN

With the participation of JINR, more than a hundred germanium detectors of the LEGEND experiment were installed

12:00 / Physics

December 4 — Day of Russian Informatics

10:00 / Information Technology

Plenary session “Russian science in the era of international rivalry” - live broadcast

15:00 / Science and society

Dmitry Chernyshenko, Deputy Prime Minister of the Russian Federation: Russia in ninth place in the world in terms of scientific development

14:30 / Science and Society

ETU "LETI" scientists taught a robot-artist to paint pictures with colored paints

14:00 / New technologies

Maxim Dreval, general director of the “Knowledge” society: How to make more people come to science

14:00 / Science and society

Ilya Vorotyntsev, acting Rector of the Russian Chemical Technical University: The Internet of Things allows you to control technological processes

13:30 / Information Technology, Science and Society

A new luminous molecule analogous to an American drug will help diagnose and treat cancer

12:00 / Medicine, Chemistry

The largest agricultural university. On December 3, 1865, the Timiryazev Academy was founded

10:00 / Biology, Science and Society, Earth Sciences

Vice President of the Russian Academy of Sciences Stepan Kalmykov: “We can overtake foreign scientists without catching up with them”

19:00 / Science and Society

In memory of the great scientist. Science in the global world. "Obvious - incredible" broadcast 05/10/2008

03/04/2019

In memory of the great scientist. Nanotechnologies. "Obvious - unbelievable" broadcast 08/3/2002

03/04/2019

Remembering Sergey Petrovich Kapitsa

02/14/2017

new 3D printer prints sugar base for artificial organs // Look

Profile

Artificial organs and tissues May 28, 2018, 15:18

Julia Vorobieva

Photo by Travis Ross, Beckman Institute.
Photo by Troy Comi.

Photo by Travis Ross, Beckman Institute.
Photo by Troy Comi.

American engineers have developed a new 3D printer that creates really sweet objects. True, they are not intended for consumption at all. Scientists print "scaffolding" from sugar crystals, which then grow into cells and turn into artificial organs.

University of Illinois engineers have developed a new 3D printer that creates really sweet objects, though not meant to be eaten.

We are talking about water-soluble biodegradable structures that are printed, unlike ordinary three-dimensional objects, not in layers, but are formed into the thinnest network of isomaltite "threads". Such material is synthesized from sucrose and is a colorless, sweet-tasting crystals.

Let us explain that in nature isomaltite is found in sugar cane, beets and honey. Its crystals are widely used in the food industry to add volume, structure and medium sweetness to foods. The production of ice cream, chocolate, caramel, grillage and other delicacies today cannot do without isomaltite.

However, this compound has other applications. Isomaltite crystals can be successfully used in biomedical engineering.

In particular, a team of American researchers proposes to create scaffolds ("scaffolding") from such material, which will become the basis for bioengineering objects.

The main advantage of the material is that it is not only durable, but also easily soluble. For example, on an isomaltite matrix, a heart, liver or other organ can be formed from tissues and cells, and then dissolved without a trace. The fabrics obtained by that time will already be able to keep their shape.

Professor of bioengineering and one of the lead authors of the work Rohit Bhargava (Rohit Bhargava) notes that the new technology also opens up unique opportunities for the study of malignant tumors. When cultures of cancer cells are grown in the lab, the tissues are flat, making it difficult to study certain characteristics. Now, specialists will have the opportunity to look at an artificially created three-dimensional tumor and understand how it actually develops in the human body, what form it takes and how it functions. The last two indicators are closely related, the professor explains.

His team used freeform printing mechanics. As the printer's nozzle moves through space, the molten material solidifies into a solid structure. And most importantly, it can be absolutely any shape.

Scientists have considered other types of "sugar" printing, but it turned out that only isomalt meets all the requirements. In other cases, there were problems either with crystallization or with the dissolution of materials, says another lead author of the study, Matthew Gelber (Matthew Gelber).

To work with the sweet compound, the team designed a special 3D printer with the required technological and mechanical characteristics. In particular, it was necessary to calibrate the nozzle diameter, print speed, as well as clearly adjust the temperature and pressure indicators.

Next, specialists from the Wolfram Research company, which produces mathematical software, joined the work.

"You have a design for what you want to get, but how do you tell the printer to do it? How do you determine the sequence to print all these intersecting threads so that it (the design - ed. ) does not collapse?", - Gelber says.

Therefore, the next stage of work was the creation of an algorithm for designing final structures and selecting print parameters.

The result is a printer that can create free-form designs from thin rod-like filaments with round cross sections.

When isomaltite dissolves, a complete organ is left, permeated with a network of "tunnels" that can take on the role of blood vessels for transporting nutrients to tissues or the role of channels in microfluidic systems (eg, "organs-on-a-chip").

It is important that the technology allows you to control the mechanical properties of each of the parts of the overall design. To do this, you need to make the appropriate changes to the print settings.

Photo by Troy Comi.

"For example, we printed a rabbit. In principle, we could change the mechanical properties of its tail so that it differs from the back or from the ears. This is very important in biological terms," explains Bhargava. When using classical polymer printing, it is impossible to achieve such an effect: the parameters of applying the material and the mechanical properties of the final object are very difficult to change, the scientist continues.

His team is now studying the microfluidic properties of the systems and doing cell culture tests to understand how quickly the sugar scaffolds can dissolve.

In addition, the researchers also plan to develop special coatings similar to tablet shells that will help control the dissolution of the structures.

Isomaltite 3D printer prototyping is described in detail in an article published in Additive Manufacturing. The engineers hope that their work will be useful to other researchers to produce a new generation of printers and explore various applications of "sweet" printing.