14 DAY TRIAL // The number of scientists and undergraduates involved in 3D printing research is growing every day, and here we have a new team dedicated to researching 3D bioprinting, a term that refers to using 3D printing technology to make living tissue and organs.
The newest team is made of researchers from the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Carnegie Mellon University. Dr. Savas Tasoglu is the leader.
Dr. Savas Tasoglu, a researcher from the Division of Renal Medicine, has been joined by Dr. Utkan Demirci, associate professor of Medicine in the Division of Biomedical Engineering, and Drs. Eric Diller and Metin Sitti, professors in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University.
What they invented is a technique that uses magnetically controlled robots, really small ones (nanobots as it were), to 3D print biological material.
They haven't actually demonstrated it yet, and probably won't be able to for a while, but they did publish a paper called “Untethered micro-robotic coding of three-dimensional material composition.”
Essentially, “untethered micro-robotic coding” is used to remotely control small robots via magnetic fields.
The robots would move biological material (held in hydrogels) into specific structures without disrupting the vitality and proliferation of biological cells.
The researchers have so far experimented with the arrangement of triangle and rod patterns, the assembly of shapes using mouse stem cells, the construction of a pyramid structure made up of differently shaped hydrogel structures and microcomponents, etc.
All in all, the technique should enable the creation of tissues and full organs eventually. It just leaves us wondering what kind of 3D printer will be invented for this, because none of the ones that already exist operate on the magnetic principles cited here as essential.
Or maybe the nanobots and hydrogels will be treated as the extruder, or material out of which shapes and tissues are grown, so to speak. We can only wait and see.