The same printer technology that sits on your desk could soon be a common fixture in rebuilding human tissue, treating burns by laying down layers of a patients' own skin or even rebuilding whole organs.

A team at Wake Forest University has built a "bioprinter" that uses cells instead of ink. It even uses an ordinary, off-the-shelf printhead, connected to test tubes full of different cell types instead of wells full of colored inks.

Led by Anthony Atala, director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine in Winston–Salem, N.C., the team is working on treating burns. Such wounds can be hard to treat, because in severe cases there might not be enough healthy skin on the patient to harvest or culture for a graft. Grafting skin to cover burn wounds is also important for preventing infections, which can be a source of complications. Printing out cells grown in culture would eliminate these problems. Another application is repairing scar tissue.

Currently, grafts are either sheets of skin taken from a donor site on the body, or layers of cells cultured in vitro from the patient. But the latter technique is not always successful as the skin cells grown in vitro must be handled carefully and the skin can break down or contract.

To treat burns, a laser would scan the wounded area and create a three-dimensional map that would be transmitted to the printer. The print head would lay down the cells layer by layer, directly on the burn.

The project is part of an $85-million U.S. Department of Defense program to apply regenerative medicine to battlefield injuries. The military is particularly interested because 10 to 30 percent of battlefield deaths result from burns.

Atala says the idea of building objects with a printer has been around for some time. He noted the idea was borrowed from computer-aided design (CAD), which for many years has translated 3-D models from the screen to prototypes. Using this technique for tissue engineering, he says, has been studied for decades.

The breakthrough in using bioprinting for tissue regeneration is the gel used to contain the cells: The mixture must hold the cells in place when they are laid down as well as provide a viable medium where they can be kept alive while they are held in the reservoirs. "It took us seven years," he says. "There's lots of trial and error; this isn't trivial chemistry," he adds.

For building tissue, several printing methods were tried, including three-dimensional CAD and laser printing. But once the group hit on the inkjet method, it turned out to work so well that some of the early work on building tissue was done on modified inkjet printers from a local office supply store.

Other organs have been constructed from cultured cells, but they were built on a scaffolding to give them their three-dimensional shape. Skin doesn't require a matrix because it is relatively flat to begin with.

So far, the system has been tested on mice, which are given wounds similar to burns. Those that were treated with printer-generated cells healed in three weeks, whereas those that were allowed to recover naturally required five weeks. The researchers plan to test the system on bigger animals in the future. The technology is still in the early stages, Atala says. As of yet there is no timetable for human tests or for the publication of the mouse research results.

The Wake Forest group is not just working on skin. Bone tissue and a two-chambered mouse heart have both been successfully printed. The heart was stimulated to beat when the cells were shocked with electricity, and the printed bones have been implanted in mice.

5 Comments

1. 1. quincykim 02:29 PM 6/17/10

   Creativity and re-purposing of existing technology--I love it. I hope the obstacles are overcome and this can save lives and limbs, both on and off the battlefield.

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2. 2. Tingting 09:46 PM 6/17/10

   I discussed with my friends on this topic days ago. I kept thinking they were joking 'cause I didn't expected the technique went so far, until I saw this news. Even though, I hadn't been convinced yet. To clone cells and pile them up to form a tissue is not so hard, but to enable the functionating of the rebuilt tissues is quite another matter. No matter how simple the cell is, it's still a complex system. I can hardly imagine how they 'copied' the sophisticated crosstalk in cells and the communication among cells to activate the rebuilt tissue. However, if the tissue-bioprinter does work, its design principle may work on the protein level which is more basic: copy proteins(easier than copy cells I think), rebuild the protein interactions then enable pathways. Organism-tissue-cell-molecule-gene, every higher-level is the complex system of the lower-level. Therefore, the design may be iterate in general no matter it's bottom-up or top-down. Once the design principle on one level is conquered, the principle on the other levels even on the whole system may be deduced. That's why I'm eager to know the exact design for this bioprinter to rebuild the interactions among the cell copies.

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3. 3. Johnay 10:47 PM 6/17/10

   I think the term the author was looking for was not CAD but stereolithography. CAD deals with the design and in-computer modeling. Stereolithography deals with laying down material in layers to form a 3D physical object.

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4. 4. jwp9447 10:43 AM 6/21/10

   Wow! That very interesting!!

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5. 5. Wayne Williamson 08:28 PM 6/22/10

   excellent...as tingting stated...it would be a good idea to lay down some blood vessels at the same time....

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