New Prototyping of Tissues and Organs

[wbengineeringmiami]

As shown on WB Engineering (I can't display links yet :/)

BODIES GONE RAPID: NEW PROTOTYPING OF TISSUES & ORGANS

Researchers in collaboration of teams in Portugal and the UK are now finding ways to build scaffolds on which new tissues and even whole organs can be grown in a laboratory – through rapid prototyping, or 3D printing.

 

In a forthcoming issue of the International Journal of Computer Applications in Technology, researchers are explaining how these new innovations have the ability to replicate the porous and hierarchical structures of natural tissues at an first-time level.

 

“Scaffold structures for tissue engineering that allow researchers to grow cells, whether skin, muscle, or even kidney, in a three-dimensional could allow medical science to create natural artificial organs. Such scaffolds are increasingly important for the future direction of regenerative medicine. However, conventional techniques have several limitations. In particular, current scaffold construction lacks full control of the often microscopic pores and their architecture.”

 

Cells might result from the patient or donor, because tissue engineering usually involves cellular implantation. Combined with a degradable scaffold in the laboratory, the scaffold can then be used to replaced damaged tissues. The body is triggered to rebuild the damaged tissue through the structure scaffold. Polymers would most likely be used to reconstruct soft body tissues, while ceramics would be used to help rebuild bone.

 

Borrowing several techniques from more conventional manufacturing, Tahar Laoui of the Department of Manufacturing and Systems at the University of Wolverhampton and Paulo Bártolo and Henrique Almeida of the Institute for Polymers and Composites, at Leiria Polytechnic Institute are going to new lengths to solve this problem.

 

In rapid prototyping, a computer controls a laser that cures a vat of polymer resin layer by layer and building up a solid object. It allows designers and manufacturers to rapidly produce a prototype component created on a CAD machine from anywhere in the world. But, it is the precision with which a material can be constructed that could be crucial to developing rapid prototyping as a tissue engineering technique.

 

Stereo lithography, which etches a block of material into shape, are one of the strongest techniques what researchers are suggesting that rapid prototyping overcomes with the limitations of conventional scaffold techniques.

“Rapid prototyping might one day allow kidney, liver and muscle tissues to be constructed in the laboratory from a patient's own cells with close-to-natural detail ready for transplantation.”

 

Full bibliographic information: "Rapid prototyping and manufacturing for tissue engineering scaffolds" in Int. J. Computer Applications in Technology, 2009, 36, 1-9 | Information from News-Medical |

 

Any thoughts on this? I think this is amazing!