Bioprinter-record holder
Super-productive 3D Bioprinter can Speed up drug development
Tatiana Matveeva, "Scientific Russia"
Nanoengineers from the University of California at San Diego (UCSD, USA) have developed a high-performance bioprinting technology that allows you to print on a 3D printer at record speed - with its help, you can get a large batch of 96 samples of human living tissues within 30 minutes, the press service of the Jacobs School of Engineering at UCSD reports.
Drawings from the press release of Super productive 3D bioprinter could help speed up drug development – VM.
The technology is described in detail in the journal Biofabrication (Hwang et al., High throughput direct 3D bioprinting in multiwell plates).
The technology will allow drug developers to quickly create large amounts of human tissue on which they could test new drugs and weed out unsuccessful samples much earlier, focusing on more promising drugs. The researchers note that while their technology cannot rule out animal testing, it can minimize the disruptions that occur at this – preclinical– stage.
Examples of geometric shapes that a high-performance 3D bioprinter can quickly create.
The new technology competes with other methods of three–dimensional bioprinting not only in terms of resolution - it allows you to print real–size 3D structures with complex microscopic characteristics, such as human liver cancer tissues containing blood vessel networks - but also in terms of speed. Printing one of these fabric samples takes about 10 seconds using this technology; printing the same sample using traditional methods will take several hours. In addition, it is no longer necessary to manually transfer samples one by one from the printing platform to tablets with screening wells: on a tablet with 96 wells, you can immediately create a batch of samples in just half an hour.
Reproducibility is another key feature of this work. The tissues that this technology allows to obtain are highly organized structures, so they can be easily reproduced for screening on an industrial scale, changing the properties, structure and functions of tissues on request.
How the technology works
To print tissue samples, researchers first create three-dimensional models of biological structures on a computer. These drawings can be obtained even with medical scans, so they can be personalized for the patient's tissues. Then the computer cuts the model into two-dimensional images and transfers them to millions of microscopic mirrors. Each mirror is digitally controlled to project patterns of violet light with a wavelength of 405 nanometers, which is safe for cells, in the form of these images. Light patterns fall on a solution containing cultures of living cells and photosensitive polymers that harden under the influence of light. Quite quickly, layer by layer, a solid polymer frame is printed, inside which live cells are contained, which will grow and form a biological tissue.
A digitally controlled micro–mirror matrix is the key to high printer speed. Because it projects entire two-dimensional patterns onto the substrate when printing layer by layer, it creates three-dimensional structures much faster than other printing methods, in which each layer is scanned line by line using a nozzle or laser.
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