by
Lisa Chamoff, Contributing Reporter | May 06, 2014
From the May 2014 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
One of Organovo’s tissue engineers
oversees the construction of a vascular
tissue construct on the Novotel
MMX Bio printer.
At a 3-D printing conference in New York City last month, Atala spoke about how scientists at the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine are working on a machine designed to print skin cells onto burn wounds, along with a scanner used to determine wound size and depth. The research is part of a grant funded by the Department of Defense, with the idea that this treatment can be used on the battlefield.
“It really makes a great difference when you bioprint,” Atala said during a talk on regenerative medicine at the conference. “You know exactly where to lay the cells down.”
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The institute is also leading a $24 million federally-funded project to develop a “body on a chip,” creating tiny organ-like structures that will be used to model the body’s response to harmful chemical and biological agents and develop potential treatments.
While Atala, a urologist, already led a team that grew and implanted a human bladder and urethra using a scaffold seeded with human cells, he notes that creating solid organs, such as a heart, liver or kidney, that can be implanted in patients and solve the organ-donor shortage, is still a ways off. “Those require much more vascularity to survive long term,” Atala says.
Researchers at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University and the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) seem to have taken a step in that direction. They recently developed a new bioprinting method to create 3-D tissue with multiple types of cells and even tiny blood vessels. The results were reported in February in the journal Advanced Materials.
“It’s really the only way to go to thicker tissue,” says lead author David Kolesky, a graduate student in SEAS and the Wyss Institute. “If you don’t have a way to deliver nutrients to the center of your tissue, they’re going to be oxygen-stressed and they’re going to die.”
Kolesky says that while this is definitely a step toward creating functional, solid organs, like a kidney, that is still years away. His team is mainly looking at how this tissue can more realistically test drug safety and effectiveness.
