Engineering the Future Madeline Winter resulting in repaired and regenerated , natural bone personalized to each patient . This will prove to have tremendous therapeutic benefit over traditional methods that either don ’ t provide regeneration or can ’ t be personalized .
Dr . Rajapakse ' s Lab University of Pennsylvania used the Allevi 2 bioprinter to print a nasal septal cartilage scaffold that precisely matched patient ’ s nasal defect , in both size and shape . Dr . Rajapakse stated in his publication , “ Nasal septal perforations ( NSPs ) are relatively common . They can be problematic for both patients and head and neck reconstructive surgeons who attempt to repair them . Often , this repair is made using an interpositional graft sandwiched between bilateral mucoperichondrial advancement flaps . The ideal graft is nasal septal cartilage . However , many patients with NSP lack sufficient septal cartilage to harvest . Harvesting other sources of autologous cartilage grafts , such as auricular cartilage , adds morbidity to the surgical case and results in a graft that lacks the ideal qualities required to repair the nasal septum . Tissue engineering has allowed for new reconstructive protocols to be developed .”
Dr . Rajapakse uses a patients ’ CT scans and converts them into a file that the Allevi 2 bioprinter could read and reconstruct . This allows him to customize the construct to match the patient ’ s nasal septal defect exactly . This is an amazing first step in the goal to create patient-specific tissue grafts that could be deployed for myriad tissue types .
Regenerate Cardiac , Nerve and Muscle Tissue
The Nervous System , a highway of electrical communications , regulates all aspects of our physiology , from movement to thoughts by having electricity chemically run across conductive tissue . That is why conductivity is a key integration in the materials used for engineering tissues .
We look to our community of material scientists to help develop the new standards in bioinks . One such example is our partnership with Dimension Inx LLC to offer a cutting edge new bioink on our platform – 3D
Graphene 3D-Paint . This novel material provides users the ability to integrate conductivity into electroactive tissues , such as skeletal and cardiac muscle , peripheral and central nerve , and biomedical devices . This electrically conductive material is one of a kind and a breakthrough in tissue engineering . While it is conductive , it also is cytocompatibile and integrates with ease into living tissue .
Nearly all tissues operate via electrical signaling to some degree ; but the biggest one , in addition to both peripheral and central nerves , is muscle ( including cardiac muscle ). Electrical conductivity as a biomaterial property is highly desirable and necessary in tissue engineering ... The problem is that traditional electrically conductive materials , like metals , do not integrate well with soft tissues in the body . Bioprinted 3D-Graphene is different and its ability to be customized within the specific tissue opens up a world of clinical applications .
Test Drugs Outside the Body
In 2012 Dr . Dongeun Huh and Dr . Donal Ingber ’ s paper in Science Translational Medicine successfully created a diseased lung-on-a-chip . Their findings demonstrated the ability to identify a drug ' s life-threatening toxicity that went unnoticed through traditional experimental methods , such as animal testing models . It was a milestone achievement , but since then organ-on-a-chip manufacturing has mostly remained unchanged . Conventional methods gave you little freedom to easily customize and create inner-chip architectures for your experimental models until now . Allevi bioprinters allow researchers to create custom architectures within organ-on-a-chip devices for disease modeling and drug testing .
Dr . Yu Shrike Zhang of MIT uses an Allevi Bioprinter to model thrombosis in his lab . Thrombosis ( or blood-clotting ) constitutes a major reason for morbidity and mortality in cardiovascular diseases and its complications . Dr . Zhang uses his Allevi bioprinter to create in-vitro thrombosis models . By printing a 3D hydrogel with microchannels running through the
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