Thanks to something called Volumetric printing, researchers believe they have developed a 3D printing technique that will allow hospitals to print blood vessels for patients in need.
According to the results of a study conducted by the Regenerative Medical Center Utrecht (RMCU), researchers believe they can now 3D Print fully functional blood cells, Until this breakthrough, researchers could print blood cells, but they were not very structurally sound. The study has created a technique that will hopefully lead to proof-of-concept productions in the near future.
The process starts with the creation of a tubular scaffold using melt electrowriting. This is then submerged into a vial with photoactive gel and placed in the volumetric bioprinter. In principle, the laser of the printer can selectively solidify the gel that sits in, on and/or around the scaffold. “In order to get this right, we had to place the scaffold exactly center in the vial,” first author Gabriël Größbacher says. “Any deviation from the center would mean that the volumetric print would be off-set. But we managed to center it perfectly by printing the scaffold on a mandril that we fitted to the vial.”
In this study, Größbacher and colleagues tested various thicknesses of the scaffold, which resulted in more or less strong tubes. Finally, they also tested various placements of the bioprinted gels. These could either be placed on the inner side of the scaffold, inside the scaffold itself or on the outside of it. By using two differently labeled stem cells, the team was able to print a proof of principle blood vessel with two layers of stem cells, and seeded epithelial cells in the center to cover the lumen of the vessel.
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