Bioprinting: Living cells in a 3D printer
In Austria, a high-resolution bioprinting process with completely new materials has now been developed at TU Wien. Via a special “bio ink” for the 3D printer, cells can now be embedded in a 3D matrix printed with micrometer precision – at a printing speed of one meter per second, orders of magnitude faster than previously possible.
Printing microscopically fine 3D objects is no longer a problem today. However, the use of living cells presents science with completely new challenges:
It is possible to first produce suitable structures and then colonise them with living cells – but this approach can make it difficult to place the cells deep inside the scaffold, and it is hardly possible to achieve a homogeneous cell distribution that way. The much better option is to embed the living cells directly into the 3D structure during the production of the structure – this technique is known as “bioprinting”.
“The behavior of a cell behaves depends crucially on the mechanical, chemical and geometric properties of its environment,” says Prof. Aleksandr Ovsianikov, head of the 3D Printing and Biofabrication research group at the Institute of Materials Science and Technology (TU Wien). “The structures in which the cells are embedded must be permeable to nutrients so that the cells can survive and multiply. But it is also important whether the structures are stiff or flexible, whether they are stable or degrade over time”.
Category: Research
