![]() ![]() “Because of those properties, I found it’s possible to print a ventricle-like structure and other complex 3D shapes without using extra support materials or scaffolds.” “FIG ink is capable of flowing through the printing nozzle but, once the structure is printed, it maintains its 3D shape,” says Choi. The innovation lies in the addition of fibres within a printable ink. "We started this project to address some of the inadequacies in 3D printing of biological tissues,” says Kevin “Kit” Parker, Tarr Family Professor of Bioengineering and Applied Physics, Head of the Disease Biophysics Group at SEAS, and senior author. “People have been trying to replicate organ structures and functions to test drug safety and efficacy as a way of predicting what might happen in the clinical setting,” says Suji Choi, Research Associate at SEAS and first author of the paper.īut until now, 3D printing techniques alone have not been able to achieve physiologically relevant alignment of cardiomyocytes, the cells responsible for transmitting electrical signals in a coordinated fashion to contract heart muscle. They discovered the fibre-infused gel (FIG) ink allows heart muscle cells printed in the shape of a ventricle to align and beat in coordination like a human heart chamber. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) report the development of a new hydrogel ink infused with gelatine fibres that enables 3D printing of a functional heart ventricle that mimics beating like a human heart. In a paper published in Nature Materials, researchers from the Harvard John A. Their goals include creating better in vitro platforms for discovering new therapeutics for heart disease, the leading cause of death in the United States, responsible for about one in every five deaths nationally, and using 3D-printed cardiac tissues to evaluate which treatments might work best in individual patients.Ī more distant aim is to fabricate implantable tissues that can heal or replace faulty or diseased structures inside a patient’s heart. This review summarizes the most recent and state of the art work in electrospinning and its uses in tissue engineering and drug delivery.Over the last decade, advances in 3D printing have unlocked new possibilities for bioengineers to build heart tissues and structures. The applications of electrospinning in tissue engineering and drug delivery are nearly limitless. Suspensions containing living cells have even been electrospun successfully. Drugs ranging from antibiotics and anticancer agents to proteins, DNA, and RNA can be incorporated into electrospun scaffolds. Electrospun fibers can be oriented or arranged randomly, giving control over both the bulk mechanical properties and the biological response to the scaffold. Various materials can be electrospun including: biodegradable, non-degradable, and natural materials. The inherently high surface to volume ratio of electrospun scaffolds can enhance cell attachment, drug loading, and mass transfer properties. Furthermore, the electrospinning process affords the opportunity to engineer scaffolds with micro to nanoscale topography and high porosity similar to the natural extracellular matrix (ECM). This renewed interest can be attributed to electrospinning's relative ease of use, adaptability, and the ability to fabricate fibers with diameters on the nanometer size scale. Despite its long history and some preliminary work in tissue engineering nearly 30 years ago, electrospinning has not gained widespread interest as a potential polymer processing technique for applications in tissue engineering and drug delivery until the last 5-10 years. ![]()
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