“Because of those properties, I found it’s possible to print a ventricle-like structure and other complex 3D shapes without using extra support materials or scaffolds.” “FIG ink is capable of flowing through the printing nozzle but, once the structure is printed, it maintains its 3D shape,” says Choi. The innovation lies in the addition of fibres within a printable ink. "We started this project to address some of the inadequacies in 3D printing of biological tissues,” says Kevin “Kit” Parker, Tarr Family Professor of Bioengineering and Applied Physics, Head of the Disease Biophysics Group at SEAS, and senior author. “People have been trying to replicate organ structures and functions to test drug safety and efficacy as a way of predicting what might happen in the clinical setting,” says Suji Choi, Research Associate at SEAS and first author of the paper.īut until now, 3D printing techniques alone have not been able to achieve physiologically relevant alignment of cardiomyocytes, the cells responsible for transmitting electrical signals in a coordinated fashion to contract heart muscle. They discovered the fibre-infused gel (FIG) ink allows heart muscle cells printed in the shape of a ventricle to align and beat in coordination like a human heart chamber. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) report the development of a new hydrogel ink infused with gelatine fibres that enables 3D printing of a functional heart ventricle that mimics beating like a human heart. In a paper published in Nature Materials, researchers from the Harvard John A. Their goals include creating better in vitro platforms for discovering new therapeutics for heart disease, the leading cause of death in the United States, responsible for about one in every five deaths nationally, and using 3D-printed cardiac tissues to evaluate which treatments might work best in individual patients.Ī more distant aim is to fabricate implantable tissues that can heal or replace faulty or diseased structures inside a patient’s heart. Altogether, these results confirm the good potential of an electrospun/3D printing composite scaffold applied to bone tissue repair.Over the last decade, advances in 3D printing have unlocked new possibilities for bioengineers to build heart tissues and structures. Through CCK-8 assay and fluoresce staining characterization, MC3T3-E1 cells exhibit a better proliferation and infiltration on the composite scaffold than on the PCL printing scaffold, which is due to the microporous structure of the electrospun scaffold. An in vitro study indicated that the 3D composite scaffolds have good biocompatibility. Mechanical testing results indicated that the compressive modulus of the 3D composite scaffold (30.50 ± 0.82 MPa) is significantly higher than that of the lyophilized electrospun scaffold (18.55 ± 0.56 MPa), which is attributed to the 3D printing scaffold. The porosity of the composite scaffold is as high as 79.32 ± 8.32%. The morphology of the composite scaffold was evaluated by a scanning electron microscope (SEM), which shows the micro-scale (100–300 μm) porous structure. In order to solve these problems, we fabricated a 3D composite scaffold by infusing PCL/gelatin dispersed nanofibers into the meshes of PCL printing scaffold. However, cells are difficult to infiltrate into the nanoporous structure of traditional electrospun scaffolds by electrospinning, and also 3D printing techniques have the disadvantage of low print resolution. Electrospinning and three-dimensional (3D) printing is widely used to fabricate bone tissue engineering scaffolds.
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