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Diabetes is quickly becoming one of the world’s top afflictions, and 3D printing could offer an on demand solution to end it forever.

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Over the past couple of years there have been a number of breakthroughs in 3D Bio-Printing human organs and tissues on demand including bones, brain tissue, cartilage, corneas, hearts, kidneys, muscle, skin, and more.

Now, in another development EPFL spin off Readily3D have announced they’ve developed a new system that can print biological tissue in just 30 seconds and that it’s already being used in a large scale European project that aims to 3D print a living model of the pancreas which can then be used to test new drugs and in time help cure diabetes by providing people in need with replacement organs – note the word curing not just treating …

See how it works

The first time you see the new model it’s a transparent shape on a computer screen – a small electronic replica of the human pancreas. Then just 30 seconds later the tissue is printed out on a bio-printer, blood vessels and all, from a sample of human stem cells.

The pancreas is a vital organ located just behind the stomach. It serves several functions, such as producing enzymes and bicarbonates essential for digestion and secreting a variety of hormones – including insulin, which is the hormone that regulates blood sugar levels. As a result, pancreatic disease often leads to diabetes since the damaged cells can no longer produce the insulin the body needs.

Over 450 million adults around the world suffer from diabetes, including 60 million in Europe. In Switzerland, 4.4% of the population reported in 2017 having been diagnosed with the disease. And the number of patients is growing worldwide. Diabetes is the second-leading cause of amputation behind accidents and increases the risk of a heart attack or stroke by a factor of eight and of kidney failure, which requires dialysis, by a factor of nine. Diabetes is also the leading cause of blindness among adults. Methods for improving diabetes diagnosis and treatment could thus bring major benefits to public health.

The bio-printing technology developed at EPFL uses a biological gel containing a patient’s stem cells. A laser is applied to the gel to solidify it through polymerisation. The location and intensity of the laser beam can be controlled in order to solidify only those areas of the gel needed to form the desired tissue.

“One of the main advantages of our method is that it can create tissue in a single block, making it particularly useful for printing soft tissue like human organs,” says Paul Delrot, the CTO of Readily3D.

There are numerous benefits to bio-printed tissue. It can be tailor-made since it’s created from a patient’s own stem cells, and it eliminates the need to conduct animal testing – something that AI, Humans on Chips, and creating digital twins of humans is also trying to accomplish.

“What’s more, patients won’t have to try out an array of drugs, some of which may have unpleasant side effects, before finding the right one for them,” says Damien Loterie, the CEO of Readily3D.

“Developing a system that can print 3D tissue at the cubic centimeter scale and faithfully replicate the functioning of a live pancreas is a huge challenge, which we hope to meet with this technology,” says Christophe Moser, an associate on the project. And, in time the team hopes they’ll be able to expand their technology so it can be used to bio-print all kinds of other tissues including treatments for cancer, for example, or eventually for producing human transplant organs on demand.

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Four years ago we could “only” 3D print human heart tissue, now we have a working mini human heart, and by the end of this decade we could have a full sized version that could be transplanted into the first brave patients.

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Although heart tissue has previously been 3D printed, in space no less, and elsewhere mini human hearts have been grown from stem cells in jars and in dishes, and researchers have even created synthetic heart cells to repair damaged hearts, scientists have now finally succeeded in creating the world’s first 3D Bio-printed vascularised heart from a patient’s own biological materials. And it’s a stunning science fiction-like accomplishment – especially given the fact that 3D bio-printing itself has only really been around for five years or so, and one that will pave the way for custom made-to-order replacement human organs in the years and decades to come.

Led by Prof. Tal Dvir the team at Israel’s Tel Aviv University started by taking a fat sample from a volunteer. That fat was then separated into its cellular and non-cellular materials. The cells were subsequently programmed to become pluripotent stem cells, which are capable of differentiating into any type of body cell. Meanwhile, the extracellular matrix, the non-cellular material, which consists largely of collagen and glycoproteins, was then made into a hydrogel.

See how the breakthrough was accomplished

Next, the stem cells were mixed into batches of the gel, after which they were prompted to differentiate into either cardiac or endothelial cells, the latter being cells that line the interior surface of blood vessels. This resulted in two types of bio-ink that were then extruded from the nozzle of a 3D bio-printer and into an Alginate-Xanthan gum supporting medium. Building up biological tissue layer by layer, this approach was first used to make patches of cardiac tissue, after which the complete heart was made.

Although the bio-printed organ is only about the size of a rabbit heart, it has all the same chambers and blood vessels as a full-size human heart, which Dvir says could be created utilising the same process. Because such organs would be made from the patient’s own biological materials, rejection by the immune system shouldn’t be a problem. Additionally, and very importantly, patients wouldn’t need to wait for donor hearts to become available, and that’s a game changer that would save potentially millions of lives. Before that point is reached, however, more work needs to be done.

“We need to develop the printed heart further,” says Dvir. “The cells need to form a pumping ability; they can currently contract, but we need them to work together. Our hope is that we will succeed and prove our method’s efficacy and usefulness … Maybe, in 10 years, there will be organ printers in the finest hospitals around the world, and these procedures will be conducted routinely.”

A paper on the research was published in the journal Advanced Science.

Source: American Friends of Tel Aviv University

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Serious burns leave scars, but new stem cell technologies and delivery systems could make those injuries a thing of the past.

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Today, there are all kinds of printers – printers that print rockets, and rocket engines, barracks and buildings, and, of course, ones that print human bone, brains, corneas, and brain tumours, hearts, and even spines. there are even 3D printers that print new human tissue from inside the human body! Yes, printers have evolved, and they couldn’t be further removed from the common-a-garden ink jet printers everyone used in the 1990’s.

In search of new ways to treat severe burns that don’t involve skin grafts, scientists at the University of Toronto have spent more than a decade developing a portable device that can print out large sheets of “bio-ink,” that’s skin cells to you and I, to boost the healing process. And the team has just put its latest model through trials where it proved capable of accelerating the regeneration of healthy skin in pigs for the first time.

The device was developed at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering, where scientists hope to create an alternative therapy to skin grafts often used to treat severe burns. These procedures involve removing skin from an unaffected part of the body and transplanting it to the wound, but their use is limited when it comes to treating full body burns and third degree burns that have penetrated most layers of the skin.

“With big burns, you don’t have sufficient healthy skin available, which could lead to patient deaths,” says study author Marc Jeschke.

The research team unveiled a handheld prototype back in 2018 that was a step up from the microwave-oven-sized device it showed off in 2014, and since then the device has undergone 10 redesigns and now resembles something close to what the researchers imagine surgeons using in an actual operating theater.

It works by printing out sheets of bio-material that contain mesenchymal stroma cells, stem cells which can differentiate into special types of cells but in this case play the role of promoting skin regeneration and minimizing scarring. Previously the team demonstrated an ability to cover a wound with new skin in two minutes or less.

Now the team is building on those results by observing how the printed skin can enhance wound healing. Its latest experiments were conducted on pig skin with full thickness burns, where the innermost and outermost layers of skin were affected, with the bio-material sheets layered directly onto the wound bed. There, the sheets were seen to promote repopulation of dermal cells and the formation of new blood vessels.

“Previously, we proved that we could deposit cells onto a burn, but there wasn’t any proof that there were any wound-healing benefits – now we’ve demonstrated that,” says Axel Guenther, study co-author.

From here, the team will work to improve the technology to further limit scarring with the belief that the handheld skin printer could enter clinical use within the next five years.

“Once it’s used in an operating room, I think this printer will be a game changer in saving lives,” says Jeschke. “With a device like this, it could change the entirety of how we practice burn and trauma care.”

The research was published in the journal Biofabrication.

Source: University of Toronto

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Surgery shouldn’t always be the only option when it comes to helping treat internal injuries, so now there’s a robot that can heal them for you – from the inside.

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Recently I reported on a new 3D Bio-Printing technology that lets doctors and surgeons print human organs and tissue directly into the human body which many people found astounding in itself. But now a new innovation has emerged from China that makes even that science fiction like capability appear mundane after researchers there unveiled prototype mini robots, equipped with 3D Bio-Printers that can heal wounds from within the human body itself.

Open wounds on the stomach wall can be serious if left untreated, sometimes requiring surgery, and this is where the new robots come into play. While we have already heard about bio-printers designed to help heal wounds, the devices are usually fairly large, and thus are limited to use on external injuries, but now Prof. Tao Xu, working at China’s Tsinghua University, is changing that.

This Bio-Printing robot can print new tissue within the human body.

Collaborating with PhD student Wenxiang Zhao he’s developed a prototype snake-like robot that could be endoscopically inserted into a patient’s stomach. It’s a delta robot, meaning that its head consists of a rigid base surrounded by three independently moving arms, and it folds down to be extra-skinny while being inserted, then opens up upon reaching the wound site.

Once it’s done so, its arms autonomously guide a tube that extrudes two types of hydrogel bio-ink – one of those contains human gastric epithelial cells, while the other contains human gastric smooth muscle cells. These are then deposited in two separate layers, forming a scaffold that covers the patients wound.

“We tested the system in two ways,” says Zhao. “First, with a biological model of a human stomach and an endoscope to mimic the insertion and printing operation elements of the process. Second, we carried out a bio-printing test in a cell culture dish to test how effective the device was at bio-printing viable cells and repairing wounds. A 10 day cell culture showed that printed cells remained at a high viability and a steady proliferation, which indicated good biological function of the cells in printed tissue scaffolds,” he said.

Xu adds that more work still needs to be done, however, such as further miniaturising the robot’s printing platform, and refining the bioinks, but as we continue to see this type of technology develop and get more compact one has to wonder when we’re going to see nanobots equipped with this kind of functionality that, like these prototypes I showed off last year, are then able to perform in vivo human surgery – something that needless to say won’t only change medicine, but will also change the human condition and take us another step closer to the Singularity.

The research is described in a paper that was recently published in the journal Biofabrication.

Source: IOP Publishing

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The meat you eat has to be raised, slaughtered, and then transported, but now you can buy real meat that never travelled a mile and never lived …

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Amazon and Ocado are growing crops in vertical farms in warehouses, not open fields, companies are 3D printing beef in space, and elsewhere companies have figured out how to feed the entire planet with just one cell from a single chicken without killing the chicken. They’ve also figured out how to grow food from air, create an unlimited supply of beef, chicken, duck, fish, and steak without killing any animals, and how to create dairy without the cow. As I’ve been saying for years now look at it however you want but the future of food doesn’t involve farms or animals … certainly not in the traditional sense. And thanks to some of these developments you could also soon see ethical T-Rex and Zebra Burgers being sold (seriously).

Now KFC have announced they’re going to be selling some of these “futuristic foods” to their punters after they signed a partnership agreement with the Russian company 3D Bioprinting Solutions to make lab made chicken nuggets, and expanded their agreement with Beyond Meat to create plant based chicken patties – all of which is an expansion of their Beyond Fried Chicken pilots in California.

In Russia, for example, the agreement now means testing the company’s 3D Bio-Printed chicken with KFC bread crumbs and spices to see if their chicken replacement can match the KFC taste, said the company.

“3D bio-printing technologies, initially widely recognized in medicine (to 3D print human organs) are nowadays gaining popularity in producing foods such as meat,” said Yusef Khesuani, co-founder of 3D Bioprinting Solutions, in a statement. “In the future, the rapid development of such technologies will allow us to make 3D printed meat products more accessible and we are hoping that the technology created as a result of our cooperation with KFC will help accelerate the launch of cell-based meat products on the market.”

Meanwhile closer to its home base in the US KFC is working with the publicly traded plant-based meat substitute developer Beyond Meat on an expansion of their recent trials for KFC’s Beyond Fried Chicken.

Continuing its wildly successful limited trials in Atlanta, Nashville and Charlotte, KFC announced it’s now setting its sights on the bigger markets in California, near Beyond Meat’s  headquarters in Los Angeles.

Beginning next week KFC will be selling Beyond Fried Chicken at 50 stores in the Los Angeles, Orange County and San Diego areas, while supplies last, the company said.

Unlike the 3D bio-printing process used by its Russian partner, Beyond Meat uses plant-based products exclusively to make its “faux” chicken meat.

KFC’s Beyond Fried Chicken first appeared on the market last year in Atlanta and was made available in additional markets in the South earlier this year. The menu item, which was first available in a one day consumer test in Atlanta, sold out in less than five hours, the company said.

“I’ve said it before – despite many imitations, the flavour of Kentucky Fried Chicken is one that has never been replicated, until Beyond Fried Chicken,” said Andrea Zahumensky, chief marketing officer, KFC USA, “We know the east coast loved it, so we thought we’d give those on the west coast a chance to tell us what they think in an exclusive sneak peek.

Beyond Fried Chicken nuggets will be available as a six or 12 piece à la carte or as part of a combo, complete with a side and medium drink starting at $6.99, plus tax.

Meanwhile, KFC’s Russian project aims to create the world’s first lab made chicken nuggets – even though Just took that title last year as I wrote about – and plans to have a trial version available from the lab this autumn in Moscow.

Popularizing lab grown meat could have a significant impact on climate change according to reports. The company cited statistics indicating that growing meat from cells could cut in half the energy consumption involved in meat production and reduce greenhouse gas emissions while dramatically cutting land use.

“Crafted meat products are the next step in the development of our ‘restaurant of the future’ concept,” said Raisa Polyakova, general manager of KFC Russia & CIS, in a statement. “Our experiment in testing 3D bio-printing technology to create chicken products can also help address several looming global problems. We are glad to contribute to its development and are working to make it available to thousands of people in Russia and, if possible, around the world.”

Source: Independent

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Being able to 3D print human organs for transplant is game changing, being able to 3D print them directly into patients is sci-fi realised.

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So far in the past few years I’ve talked a lot about how we are now using exponential technologies like 3D printing, 3D Bio-Printing, and 4D Bio-Printing to print human organs and tissues on demand in hospitals and labs. But what if you didn’t have to bother with printing them in a lab and could just print them straight into the transplant patients who need them? Well, now in another medical advance that future might one day become a possibility.

Although we’re hearing more about 3D printed human organs and tissues  the fact remains that they still need to be implanted into patients using relatively large incisions, but now a new bio-ink could allow body parts to be printed directly within the body.

First of all, other types of bio-inks do already exist. They’re generally a liquid containing living cells, a framework material, and growth factors that prompt the cells to reproduce within that framework material, gradually changing it over to pure biological tissue.

Such bio-inks are extruded from the nozzle of a 3D printer, building up body parts outside of the body, layer by layer. In many cases, they’re cured into a solid material via exposure to ultraviolet light. Unfortunately, though, UV rays would be harmful to the patient’s own tissue if administered inside the body.

That’s where the new bio-ink comes in. It was developed through a collaboration between scientists from the California-based Teraski Institute, Ohio State University, and Pennsylvania State University.

The fluid is dispensed from the fine tip of a robotically-controlled nozzle, that is surgically inserted into the patient’s body through a small incision. In order to hold each strand of the bio-ink in place, the nozzle punctures a small void in the patient’s soft internal tissue, then deposits an anchoring blob of the fluid within that space. As the nozzle is subsequently withdrawn, it places another blob on the outside of that tissue, serving as an additional anchor. The rest of the strand is then drawn over to another anchoring point.

Importantly, the bio-ink can be internally applied at normal body temperature, and cured into a solid using a non-UV visible light source, and that’s the potential game changer.

Although the substance may someday be used to build parts such as blood vessels or spinal discs, like the ones that were printed outside of the body recently, in vivo it’s hoped that some of its more immediate uses may include the application of patches on damaged or defective organs, such as to replace damaged heart tissue after a heart attack, or the creation of hernia repair meshes and much more. The research is described in a paper that was recently published in the journal Biofabrication.

Source: Teraski Institute

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Corals today are under threat from climate change and warming acidic oceans, and if they can’t recover naturally they may need a helping hand.

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The mass die off of coral reefs is a catastrophe of global proportions but the sheer scale of their success as organisms has many lessons for science, and now, alongside creating hunter-killer robots that kill off coral eating starfish like the Crown of Thorns, scientists from the University of Cambridge have managed to 3D print bionic corals that, if let out into the wild, could help quickly reverse the decline of some of the world’s most spectacular coral reefs like the Great Barrier Reef in Australia.

If 3D printed corals sound familiar that’s because a couple of years ago some other researchers in the Caribbean suggested using 3D printed structures to resemble the complex shapes of reefs as solid bases on which new corals and other animals could grow, and elsewhere another  team 3D printed genetically modified corals that were, to all intents and purposes, heat resistant.

Corals are in fact a highly evolved symbiosis between the coral organisms themselves and algae that live inside them. The algae use photosynthesis to power the creation of sugar for their host, and the coral provide a safe living environment, and, interestingly, the coralline structures are also highly efficient at collecting and redirecting light so the algae can thrive. This partnership has been fruitful for millions of years, but rising ocean temperatures and acidity have upset the delicate balance in recent decades.

In order to successfully imitate the coral micro-ecosystem the team realised they’d need to replicate that special quality of capturing and redirecting sunlight within the coralline structure so the algae could make the best use of it, and to do so they studied the structure of corals closely and worked out a way to print them at a microscopic level. But instead of using an ordinary hard substrate they created an amazing sort of living gel.

“We developed an artificial coral tissue and skeleton with a combination of polymer gels and hydrogels doped with cellulose nanomaterials to mimic the optical properties of living corals,” explained Cambridge chemist Daniel Wangpraseurt, lead author of the paper in which the technique is described. Algae were infused into the mixture as well, so the researchers were essentially printing living matter.

That kind of technique is already being tested and used for medical purposes – printing human organs and tissues for implantation, for instance. In this case though the 3D Bio-Printers were repurposed to print bionic corals instead and they were ideal because these corals need to be 3D printed with an extremely complex internal geometry that maximizes the reach of light hitting the surface – it also has to be done very quickly aswell or the algae will die from exposure.

The resulting bionic corals then became the ideal home for the algae but even better the new corals were so effective that the algae grew multiple times faster than they do in natural corals. As a result there’s still hope yet that we might be able to reverse the declines in coral populations around the world – that is unless we can solve climate change first.

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3D printing human organs on demand is one thing, but now 3D printed tumours can help researchers develop better cancer cures faster.

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So far we’ve 3D printed everything from buildings, cars, and electronics, to human tissue and robots, and now researchers in the US have 3D printed cancers which might sound odd, but bear with me. In the US the cancer death rate has dropped 27 percent in the last quarter-century, resulting in just over 600,000 deaths from the disease nationally in 2019, and this steady decline is in large part thanks to new, effective cancer treatments that have transformed the disease from a death sentence to a survivable, chronic condition.

But despite these promising statistics, some cancers still resist traditional treatment. In particular, a type of aggressive, fast-growing brain tumor called a glioblastoma is resistant to many forms of cancer treatment and still has an expected survival rate of only 11 – 15 months.

Part of the challenge when it comes to treating tumors like glioblastomas, which can develop resistance to typical cancer drugs, is to determine how different treatments will affect the tumor growth before applying those treatments to cancer patients. The gold standard for this kind of testing is still often animal models, such as mice and rats, but these models can be tricky to work with and vary widely, making them non-ideal for repeated, controlled testing.

So, instead of relying on imperfect, biological samples to solve this problem, a multidisciplinary team of scientists decided to 3D print their own brain tumors instead.

Using glioblastoma cancer cells derived from patients themselves, the team created a bio-ink that could be printed using a 3D bio-printer to create little, lumpy spheroids, or 3D tumors. Xavier Intes, co-author and co-director of project from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, told reporters these life-like models can help scientists better understand how to tackle this problem in a controlled environment.

“There’s a lot of drive to better understand the biology of tumors, and glioblastomas are among the most lethal ones,” said Intes. “They can vary very much patient to patient. One of the issues has always been understanding how we can try to tackle this disease. The unique aspect of this bioprinting is that its really going to print to biology.”

By printing the biology the researchers are then able to study their biological reaction to drugs in a controlled environment. Importantly, these tumors were even complete with bio-printed blood vessels for the cancer drugs to be delivered through. Intes went on to add that these vascular pathways are not only essential for creating a pathway for the drug to reach the cells but to also more accurately recreate a real tumor environment.

While vascular systems have been included in previous model studies, such as Tumors-on-a-Chip, this study is unique in applying them to 3D printed tumors.

Researchers were able to conduct their drug trials on the 3D tumor over 70 days, much longer than other non-living models, and were able to closely watch how the tumor responded to treatment using a new non-damaging imaging method designed for the trial.

The team designed a fast, deep-tissue imaging technique that could see through the thick Plexiglas container holding the tumors and down to their cellular activity. The speed of this approach allowed the researchers to take measurements with minimal photo damage to the tissue, the authors write. This allowed them to more accurately see if the drug had reached the cancer cells as well as if the cancer cells were dying as a result.

“We developed a new technology that allows us to go deeper than fluorescence microscopy,” Intes said in a statement. “It allows us to see, first, if the cells are growing, and then, if they respond to the drug.”

Intes said that this approach can not only be used to better understand how different therapies affect glioblastomas but can be applied to other cancers, such as breast and prostate, as well as other diseases at large.

Going forward, Intes says the team will work to improve the speed required to create and test these tumors so that life-saving information can reach the patients as soon as possible.

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3D Printing human organs has its problems so scientists created a 4D Bio-Printing technology to solve them and pave the way for better printed, on demand, human organs that grow with their hosts.

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Recently we’ve been using stem cells and 3D Bio-Printing to create and print a whole host of odd things – everything from tiny functioning human hearts and brain tissue, all the way through to human bone, cartilage, corneas, and skin, and even beef in space. But there’s a problem – like any type of tissue without the right support the 3D printed structures quickly collapse which makes some of these amazing breakthroughs useless when it comes to using them in humans. And this is where researchers think 4D printing, that’s being used experimentally by NASA to print self-assembling space stations and satellites in orbit, and where the fourth dimension is time, might help.

Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of mortality worldwide, accounting for nearly 18 million deaths each year, according to the World Health Organization. In recent years, scientists have looked to regenerative therapies, including 3D printed heart tissue and stem cell therapies, to repair damage done to the heart and restore cardiac function. And thanks to advancements in 3D printing technology over the past number of years researchers have been applying cutting edge 3D bio-printing techniques, using printers that print living tissue not reports or pie charts, to create scaffolds that support the living tissue, but it’s not been enough and researchers have been finding that the tissues don’t integrate with native tissues in the body, which makes them functionally useless.

While 3D bio-printers can create 3D structures made of living cells the final product is static – it can’t grow or change in response to changes in its environment, AKA within the human body. And that’s the problem especially if you’re going tom be implanting the new organs and tissues into children, for example.

Conversely, in 4D Bio-Printing, a technology field so new it’s still in its shrinkwrap, researchers apply 4D printing strategies to create constructs using biocompatible, responsive materials or cells that can grow or even change functionalities over time in response to their environment. This technology could be a game-changer for human health, particularly in pediatrics, where 4D printed constructs as they’re known could grow and change as children age, eliminating the need for future surgeries to replace tissues or scaffolds that fail to do the same.

But, 4D bio-printing technology is still young, very young. One of the critical challenges affecting the field at the moment is the lack of advanced 4D printable bioinks – material used to produce engineered live tissue using printing technology – that not only meet the requirements of 3D bioprinting, but also feature the smart, dynamic abilities to regulate cell behaviours and respond to changes in the environment – wherever they’re implanted in the body.

Recognising this, researchers at George Washington University (GWU) and the University of Maryland are now working together to shed new light on this field after GWU Associate Professor Lijie Grace Zhang and UMD Professor and Chair John Fisher were recently awarded a joint $550,000 grant from the US National Science Foundation to develop new 4D bio-printing techniques to develop smart constructs for cardiovascular study.

Their main goal is to “design novel and Reprogrammable Bio-Inks that can create dynamic 4D-bioprinted constructs to repair and control the muscle cells that make up the heart and pump blood throughout the body.”

The muscle cells they’re working with – human induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) derived cardiomyocytes – represent a promising stem cell source for cardiovascular regeneration.

In this study, the bioinks, and the 4D structures they’re used to create, are considered “reprogrammable” because they can be precisely controlled by external stimuli – in this case, by light – to contract and elongate on command in the same way that native heart muscle cells do with each and every heartbeat.

The research duo will use long-wavelength near-infrared (NIR) light to serve as the stimulus that prompts the 4D bio-printed structures into action. Unlike ultraviolet or visible light, long-wavelength NIR light could efficiently penetrate the bio-printed structures without causing harm to surrounding cells.

“4D bio-printing is at the frontier of the field of bio-printing,” Zhang said. “This collaborative research will expand our fundamental understanding of iPSC cardiomyocyte development in a dynamic microenvironment for cardiac applications. We are looking forward to a fruitful collaboration between our labs in the coming years.”

“We are thrilled to work with Dr. Zhang and her lab to continue to develop novel bioinks for 3D and 4D printing,” Fisher said. “We are confident that the collaborative research team will continue to bring to light untapped printing strategies, particularly in regards to stem cell biology.”

Moving forward, Zhang and Fisher hope to apply their 4D bioprinting technique to further study of the fundamental interactions between 4D structures and cardiomyocyte behaviors.

“The very concept of 4D bio-printing is so new that it opens up a realm of possibilities in tissue engineering that few had ever imagined,” Fisher said. “While scientists and engineers have a lot of ground to cover, 4D bio-printed tissue could one day change how we treat pediatric heart disease, or even pave the way to alternatives to donor organs.”

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Getting food into orbit is expensive, and most of the food is dubious anyway, but 3D printing and new technologies are giving us entirely new ways to produce food anywhere and anytime.

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Most people like eating meat but the ecological impacts of raising livestock to feed seven billion humans isn’t insignificant, which is just one of the reasons why we’re seeing the rise of so called clean meat alternatives – meats that include everything from beef, chicken, duck, salmon and even tuna, that are all grown without the animals either using stem cells cultured in bioreactors. So far though all of these clean meats, which China recently bought $300m worth of from Israel, and that the US FDA recently approved for sale to US consumers, are grown on Earth. But what about meat loving astronauts? Now, for the first time, the company that bought you lab grown fillet steak have just announced they’ve made synthetic meat in space aboard the International Space Station (ISS), but instead of growing it in a bioreactor they 3D printed it using a 3D Bio-Printer – the same kind that’s being used to 3D print human organs, from brains to skin  for use in human transplants.

In order to achieve their breakthrough Israeli startup Aleph Farms partnered with several 3D printing companies to conduct their experiment, and the company says this is the first time anyone has produced clean meat in space. Ironically though it’s not the first “meat” produced in space after another company, Techshot, managed to 3D print human heart tissue on the ISS a couple of years ago. Yes, this story just keeps getting weirder – welcome to the future.

3D Printing beef in space

Aleph Farms’ process for producing artificial beef, and by artificial I mean real beef grown in the same way it grows in a cow, except those processes were replicated outside of the cow, relies on mimicking the natural muscle-tissue regeneration process in our bovine herds. And if you’ve ever eaten a bad steak you know it’s not just the animal cells that matter — it’s also the way they’re organised and the texture of the meat that matters.

Aleph Farms says its current process results in a more realistic piece of slaughter-free clean meat, but nevertheless so far getting that meaty texture right has been a challenge for most lab grown meat companies so doing experiments in space could help inform how we recreate the real texture of meat here on Earth.

The experiment took place in the Russian lab on the ISS using a printer developed by Russian based 3D Bioprinting Solutions, and in order to create the beef the animal cells were mixed with growth factors to create the so called “Bio-ink” for the printer.

The printer then laid down layer after layer of cells, which grow into a small piece of muscle tissue. The company says bio-printing meat in space has the potential to be much faster than it is on Earth, and without gravity the beef cells can grow in all directions without the need for any support structure, whereas on Earth, you need a lattice or scaffold to help them grow in the right ways and can only print from one side at a time.

While we’re still some way from making 3D printed meat financially viable on Earth, even though the costs have dropped from over $1,000,000 per pound to just $363 today and just $60 in the near future thanks to new processes, the costs of space travel and transporting goods, like food, into orbit are astronomical so it might actually make sense for astronauts on extended missions to produce some of their meat in 3D printers rather than having everything pre-packaged.

All that said though and as amazing as the breakthrough is Aleph Farms still say they’re committed to expanding their beef printing techniques here on Earth, which in time will give us a new problem to solve – when we can grow steak on demand what do we do with all those cows and all that land?

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