Bioprinting involves printing devices that deposit biological material, with the long-term goal of creating replacement organs or even entire organisms. While current bioprinters lack the speed and fine-tuning for commercial deployment, newer ones can extrude single cells from a micropipette. Biophysicist Gabor Forgacs has used combinations of “bioink” and “biopaper” to print complex 3D structures, albeit not at cellular resolution. However, using the single-cell resolution micropipette approach, they were able to create functional, living tissue that behaved like the organ it came from.
Bioprinting is a new area of research and engineering involving printing devices that deposit biological material. The long-term goal is that the technology can be used to create replacement organs or even entire organisms from biological raw materials.
Today, bioprinters are under development and are mainly used as scientific instruments. They lack the speed and fine-tuning needed for commercial deployment, although that day may not be far off. Early bioprinters deposited drops of up to 100 picolitres (by comparison, the volume of a cell is about 3 picolitres, and the best inkjet printers can deposit droplets of 1-5 picolitres by volume) at rates in the tens of thousands per second. Newer bioprinters can extrude single cells from a micropipette at a slower rate.
A bioprinter developed by Gabor Forgacs, a biophysicist at the University of Missouri in Columbia, has used combinations of “bioink” and “biopaper” to print complex 3D structures, albeit not at cellular resolution. Operating at 10,000 dots per second (10 kHz), a 100 picolitre printer can produce 60 microliters of tissue every minute, or 86 milliliters per day, an amount of tissue that could nearly fill a typical test tube. The downside of the 100-picoliter printer is its low resolution: Most organic tissue we’re familiar with requires precise organization at the cellular level to function properly.
When Forgacs used the single-cell resolution micropipette approach, they were able to create functional, living tissue that behaved like the organ it came from. For example, when they used the bioprinter to deposit chicken heart cells onto a plate, they started beating synchronously. Given a highly detailed map of the cellular networks in a human heart, there are no fundamental barriers between moving from this rudimentary bioprinter to one that prints complete human organs within a decade or two.
Bioprinters can be found throughout science fiction. For example, in The Fifth Element, one of the main characters gets his body created by a bioprinter in the film’s opening scene. Some have even lauded bioprinting as a possible path to immortality, but this is dubious in the short term due to the difficulty of avoiding disturbing surface cells when replacing aging internal cells.
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