Wake Forest Institute develops 3D bioprinter that makes transplantable human ear

The process is called ITOP, for Integrated Tissue and Organ Printer. But until now, a major stumbling block has been the scale of the printed structures.

3D printing has been helpful in making plastic knick knacks, action figures, braces for broken arms and phone cases, and now is going to help in making new ears and other organs.

Both biodegradable plastic materials which form the tissue structure and water-based gels that house the cells were deposited by this printer.

Other 3D printers don’t work at such a precise or small scale to do what Atala’s team needed, which was to effectively mimic capillaries in order to keep the cell-laden hydrogels from deteriorating.

Researchers at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center have taken this latter path to engineering structures of adequate size and strength to implant in the human body. The advantage of such implantations would be that it will reduce the organ rejection syndrome as the printed tissue will come from the patient and it can also be built to have the same shape and structure as it did before.

Using a sophisticated 3D printer, a team of researchers at the Wake Forest University Institute for Regenerative Medicine has created living human body parts, including ears. This device is capable of producing stable human tissue constructs of all shapes. ‘Demonstrating three different tissue-like structures, which they’ve implanted into animal models is a great demonstrator of what can be achieved with current technology if you can package it all together in one unit, ‘ he says.

Researchers using a bioprinter, described Monday in Nature Biotechnology, say that they’ve found a way to manufacture living muscle, bone and cartilage.

The researchers have spent the last 10 years developing the ITOP system.

A 3D bioprinting system developed at Wake Forest School of Medicine can produce bone, cartilage, and skeletal muscle at clinically relevant sizes, shapes, and structural integrity.

Now, scientists at Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine have hit a new landmark in the field of 3-D printing and human health. Before they can be implanted in humans, the printed parts will need be monitored longer, to know how well they will perform in a body after years of wear. This, combined with micro-channels that allow nutrients and oxygen from the body to permeate the structure, allows the system to remain alive while it develops a system of blood vessels. Most importantly, these early results indicate that the structures have the right size, strength and function for use in humans.

“Future development of the integrated tissue-organ printer is being directed to the production of tissues for human applications, and to the building of more complex tissues and solid organs”, Atala continued. When these structures were implanted in animals, they grew into functional tissue and created a system of blood vessels. They planted muscle tissue within rats and observed nerve formation within two weeks.