3-D printed models of heart, arteries developed

Fortunately, recent work by a group at Carnegie Mellon could one day lead to a world in which transplants are no longer necessary to fix damaged organs.

Now 3D printers are more efficient when creating items using hard, rigid materials such as ceramic, metal, plastic, and glass.

“Soft materials, those that can deform under their own weight, have been more challenging to support during the [3D] print process”, senior author of the study Adam Feinberg, who is a biomedical engineer at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, said. So we developed a method of printing these soft materials inside a support bath material. These traditional 3D printers cost a little less than $1,000 and use software that can be tweaked.

The 3D printer works much like an ordinary printer – which lays down ink – except the 3D printer lays down flat layers of material (instead of ink) on top of each other, creating a three-dimensional object.

The researchers cautioned that they have not yet bioprinted organs.

He continues, “We can take materials like collagen, fibrin and alginate, which are the types of materials the body uses to build itself, and 3D print them”.

Scientists have even used 3D printing in order to implant dissolvable airway splints, which were used for treating 3 infants suffering from severe tracheobronchomalacia, a life-threatening disease which can cause cardiac arrest.

“Essentially, we print one gel inside of another gel, which allows us to accurately position the soft material as it’s being printed, layer-by-layer”, said Feinberg. Furthermore, the team claim that the gel used in their FRESH procedure can be easily melted away and removed by heating to body temperature, avoiding potential damage to delicate biological molecules or living cells. The researchers will begin working toward incorporating real heart cells into the tissue structures they print. They hope to eventually develop contractile muscles, which help the heart move and pump blood. “And we are also contributing back by releasing our 3D printer designs under an open-source license”.

This week, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University took a few small steps along the road towards successful, potentially life-saving bioprinting.

Though 3D bioprinting is costly method and requires specialists for expert level operation but professor Feinberg and his team has been able to implement this technique on conventional 3-D printers which will cut cost as well as improve the quality of the product by allowing changes and shuffles. “Not only is the cost low, but by using open-source software, we have access to fine-tune the print parameters, optimise what we’re doing and maximise the quality of what we’re printing”, Feinberg said.

Freeform Reversible Embedding of Suspended Hydrogels (FRESH) is the name of the new technique that was used by scientists when printing simplified anatomical structures.