(July 2, 2012) Researchers are hopeful that new advances in tissue engineering and
regenerative medicine could one day make a replacement liver from a patient’s
own cells, or animal muscle tissue that could be cut into steaks without ever
being inside a cow. Bioengineers can already make 2D structures out of many
kinds of tissue, but one of the major roadblocks to making the jump to 3D is
keeping the cells within large structures from suffocating; organs have
complicated 3D blood vessel networks that are still impossible to recreate in the
laboratory.
Now, University of Pennsylvania
researchers have developed an innovative solution to this perfusion problem:
they’ve shown that 3D printed templates of filament networks can be used to
rapidly create vasculature and improve the function of engineered living
tissues.
The research was conducted by a
team led by postdoctoral fellow Jordan S. Miller and Christopher S. Chen, the
Skirkanich Professor of Innovation in the Department of Bioengineering at Penn,
along with Sangeeta N. Bhatia, Wilson Professor at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology, and postdoctoral fellow Kelly R. Stevens in Bhatia’s laboratory.
Their work was published in the
journal Nature Materials.