3D printer’s tiny products may bring big changes
Big steps toward revolutionizing tissue regeneration
SASKATOON, Sask. — Researchers at the University of Saskatchewan are in the market for a 3D printer whose tiny products could help them make big steps toward revolutionizing tissue regeneration.
Mechanical engineering professor Daniel Chen has spent more than 20 years studying the application of 3D printing in treating major injuries in human tissue — for body parts as large as a heart or as small as a nerve.
He and his team use printers to create tiny organic “tissue scaffolds” that can be implanted into patients to create a “pathway” for healing that wouldn’t normally happen — like when the gap between damaged areas is too large.
“Let’s say you have a severed nerve in the finger,” Chen said. “Normally the surgeon can sew that together and the function can be recovered. But if the gap is too big, you need something to bridge it. That’s what we’re doing here.
“This concept comes from civil engineering — like a scaffold you would use to build a building.”
Instead of bricks and wood, Chen’s scaffolds are made of the host’s cellular tissue, fashioned layer by layer into a customized scaffold before it’s implanted back into the patient.
The technology is still a ways off from appearing at your local hospital, but that hasn’t stopped Chen’s lab and his team of 15 students from being at the forefront of its potential applications. PhD student Zahra Yazdanpanah, for example, is studying how scaffolds could help repair certain types of bone in the hip, where cartilage often deteriorates with age.
She says t he new printer will have the ability to contain multiple types of materials in the head of the printer and to print with more than one material at a time. This will allow the lab to create more complex combinations of mechanical and biologically compatible materials, like blood vessels.
“We can print some specific structures called core and shell structures,” Yazdanpanah said. “For example, the core can be one material to give mechanical support, and the other material — the shell — can be the appropriate matrix for living cells and growth structures.”
Yazdanpanah is experimenting on mice. It’s not known when scaffolds will be clinically applicable, but Chen said partnerships between his lab and faculty in the colleges of medicine and veterinary medicine have already broadened their horizons.
Chen hopes the new printer will help him and his team further research the countless potential applications of scaffolds.
Chen’s current printer, which he bought 10 years ago for around $300,000, could create objects as small as 100 micrometres.
The new one, which he’s still searching for, could cost as little as $160,000 and print objects as small as 10 micrometres — an eighth of the diameter of a human hair.
“This is a lot like our cellphones — it’s getting cheaper, but the technology is improving,” Chen said.