Right before Christmas I went to a conference all about tissue engineering. This one was just for fun because I think it is really really cool. I didn't have to present and got to just go around an look at all the posters and listen to many interesting talks. I'll talk more about some of the things that I learned later, but let's start with the best stuff. BIOPRINTERS. These things are amazing. There were three vendors there showing off their cool printers. These are 3D printers so they can print just about any structure you can design. They had examples of plastic noses and ears that the machines had printed. But since these are bioprinters you want to be printing with cooler stuff than plastic. The companies sell special printer ink that is made out of collagen or elastin or other organic molecules called matrix. The idea is you either print your shape and then grow cells on the top or mix cells in with the ink and let the cells just grow inside the thing you printed. The applications are mostly in wound healing. For example using a printer to print a skin graft. The graft will start out made mostly of the matrix which will seal the wound preventing infection and breakdown of the surrounding tissue. The cells in the matrix will grow and fill it in. Eventually the wound will completely heal ideally without any major scar tissue.
Some things that I learned about bioprinting included that it is really hard to get the matrix to set just right. You want to start with something that is nicely liquid so you can easily squirt it out the tiny printer nozzle but you want your matrix to have some structure to it especially if you are printing something like a bone graft. So there has to be a step that cures the matrix making it less liquidy than it was when it was first printed. There are many different ways of doing this like shining a light on it or mixing it with another chemical kind of like two part epoxy. The complication is that many of the curing methods kill cells. There were several engineers working on this problem of getting the matrix to the right consistency while keeping the cells happily alive. I also learned that you often have to print in a liquid. I really should have known this but having mostly seen examples printed with hard plastic I just didn't think about it. Most animal cells need to be kept wet to stay alive if they are exposed to air, most kinds of cells will die. So when printing cells there has to be something around to keep the cells nicely moist. Finaly, like everything else, bioprinters look really cool with backlighting. I am trying to come up with some experiments to do that would require a bioprinter. Then I could print all the tiny ears anyone would ever need.
Right before Christmas I went to a conference all about tissue engineering. This one was just for fun because I think it is really really cool. I didn't have to present and got to just go around an look at all the posters and listen to many interesting talks. I'll talk more about some of the things that I learned later, but let's start with the best stuff. BIOPRINTERS. These things are amazing. There were three vendors there showing off their cool printers. These are 3D printers so they can print just about any structure you can design. They had examples of plastic noses and ears that the machines had printed. But since these are bioprinters you want to be printing with cooler stuff than plastic. The companies sell special printer ink that is made out of collagen or elastin or other organic molecules called matrix. The idea is you either print your shape and then grow cells on the top or mix cells in with the ink and let the cells just grow inside the thing you printed. The applications are mostly in wound healing. For example using a printer to print a skin graft. The graft will start out made mostly of the matrix which will seal the wound preventing infection and breakdown of the surrounding tissue. The cells in the matrix will grow and fill it in. Eventually the wound will completely heal ideally without any major scar tissue. 
Some things that I learned about bioprinting included that it is really hard to get the matrix to set just right. You want to start with something that is nicely liquid so you can easily squirt it out the tiny printer nozzle but you want your matrix to have some structure to it especially if you are printing something like a bone graft. So there has to be a step that cures the matrix making it less liquidy than it was when it was first printed. There are many different ways of doing this like shining a light on it or mixing it with another chemical kind of like two part epoxy. The complication is that many of the curing methods kill cells. There were several engineers working on this problem of getting the matrix to the right consistency while keeping the cells happily alive. I also learned that you often have to print in a liquid. I really should have known this but having mostly seen examples printed with hard plastic I just didn't think about it. Most animal cells need to be kept wet to stay alive if they are exposed to air, most kinds of cells will die. So when printing cells there has to be something around to keep the cells nicely moist. Finaly, like everything else, bioprinters look really cool with backlighting. I am trying to come up with some experiments to do that would require a bioprinter. Then I could print all the tiny ears anyone would ever need. 
Can you just try printing stem cells? THAT would be cool. And very useful!
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