What is Bioprinting?
Written by Michael Anissimov Bioprinting is a new area of research and engineering that involves printing devices that deposit biological material. The long-term goal is that the technology could be used to create replacement organs or even entire organisms from raw biological materials. Today, bioprinters are in the development stage and primarily are used as scientific tools. They lack the speed and fine-tuning necessary for commercial deployment, though that day might not be far off. The first bioprinters deposited drops as small as 100 picoliters (by comparison, the volume of a cell is around 3 picoliters and the best inkjet printers can deposit drops 1-5 picoliters in volume) at a rate of tens of thousands per second. More recent bioprinters can extrude individual cells from a micropipette at a lower speed. A bioprinter developed by Gabor Forgacs, a biophysicist at the University of Missouri in Columbia, used combinations of “bioink” and “biopaper” to print complex 3D structures,
Bioprinting is a new area of research and engineering that involves printing devices that deposit biological material. The long-term goal is that the technology could be used to create replacement organs or even entire organisms from raw biological materials. Today, bioprinters are in the development stage and primarily are used as scientific tools. They lack the speed and fine-tuning necessary for commercial deployment, though that day might not be far off. The first bioprinters deposited drops as small as 100 picoliters (by comparison, the volume of a cell is around 3 picoliters and the best inkjet printers can deposit drops 1-5 picoliters in volume) at a rate of tens of thousands per second. More recent bioprinters can extrude individual cells from a micropipette at a lower speed. A bioprinter developed by Gabor Forgacs, a biophysicist at the University of Missouri in Columbia, used combinations of “bioink” and “biopaper” to print complex 3D structures, albeit not at cellular resolu
Bioprinting is a biomedical application of rapid prototyping technology. What is rapid prototyping? It is an additive manufacturing or layer-by-layer deposition according to pre-determined computer-aided design. Our goal is to print human living organs suitable for clinical transplantation. We have been awarded a prestigious NSF FIBR grant and I was awarded a grant by my university to create the world’s first Bioprinting Research Center. We are making progress and one of our ongoing projects is self-explanatory ? Charleston Bioengineered Kidney Project. In the next decade we plan to print living human kidney. But it is obviously a long term goal. However, we strongly believe that one of the potential, short term markets for bioprinting technology is bioart, or biopainting and biosculpture of living forms that are evolving. Genetically labeled from fluorochromes, living cells or cell aggregates can create patterns by growing in specially designed miniature mini-bioreactors which have “b
