Cellular engineering

3D printing makes it easier to create tissue for medical research

Drugs can be tested this way, and whole organs may one day be grown

Cultivating cells in a Petri dish is a time-honoured way of experimenting on biological tissues. But it is not particularly reliable. The problem is that cells often need specific structural support to function correctly. To provide this, tissue engineers are turning to 3d printers to make tiny bespoke scaffolds onto which cells are “seeded”. This encourages those cells to grow and develop. As research into tissue engineering advances, so too do ways of printing the scaffolds. As two recent examples show, this could lead to better drug treatments for diseases such as cancer, and even to complete artificial organs suitable for transplant.

Glioblastoma is an aggressive cancer that begins in the brain, and rapidly evolves resistance to drugs. The best chance of treatment is to cultivate, in the laboratory, samples of an individual’s tumour and then bombard these with different combinations of drugs until an effective mixture is found.

Two South Korean researchers, Cho Dong-Woo of Pohang University of Science and Technology and Sun Ha-Paek of Seoul National University Hospital, have come up with a way to print 3d structures out of glioblastoma cells. These develop into mature cancers within two weeks and can, as the researchers reported recently in Nature Biomedical Engineering, be used to test novel drug cocktails—apparently with success, although existing regulations mean that such drug combinations cannot yet be given the ultimate test, in patients.

In the second example, Filippos Tourlomousis of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, working with a team at the Stevens Institute of Technology, in New Jersey, produced a scaffold from polymer fibres a mere hundredth of a millimetre wide—far smaller than most 3d printers can manage. The team did this by drawing the fibres out using an electric field applied between the print nozzle and the surface onto which the fibres were being printed.

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