Where can I find “modified” inkjet printers?
COTS inkjet printers can be modified to print a lot of stuff; the trick is to generate an ‘ink’ formulation that can tolerate the printing process and won’t gunk up the printing mechanism. For cells in particular, there have been a few amazingly hackish solutions using thermal inkjet printers: despite being ejected from the head at high speed in a droplet with a boiling surface, about 90% of cells survive. Though you’d probably need institutional access to get the papers, you can check out the abstract on pubmed or go to Dr. Boland’s bio at Clemson University. There’s supposed to be a link to his lab from the latter, but in the grand tradition of biomedical engineering web sites it is broken in a horrible way. You should try buying a sacrificial print cartridge, cleaning it out really good, and injecting what
