Beyond Human by Erik Seedhouse

Author:Erik Seedhouse
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Springer Berlin Heidelberg, Berlin, Heidelberg

Fig. 5.3Your internal organs. (Courtesy: Wikimedia/Mikael Häggström)

While choosing the right bioink is fairly easy, using the right technique represents more of a challenge, but in recent years engineers have developed a number of biofabrication techniques to cater for all sorts of anatomical structures. For example, solid scaffold-based biofabrication is a technique in which a scaffold serves as a temporary supporting structure and is biodegradable. The scaffolds, which can be synthetic or naturally derived, are laid down in a top-down approach, and have been used by tissue engineers to create relatively simple tissue-engineered bladders. It’s an effective way of creating simple body structures, but it won’t work for complex organs such as the heart. That’s because the technique uses animal-derived xenogeneic (meaning they are derived from a different species) scaffolds, which, while suitable immunologically for simple structures such as a bladder, won’t work for complex organs. So, to get around this problem, scientists are investigating scaffolds that use living human cells. These are allogeneic (meaning they are genetically different because they are derived from separate individuals of the same species) and therefore work much better immunologically than animal-derived xenogeneic scaffolds.

To bioprint circular structures, tissue engineers use cell sheet technology, a biofabrication technique that can be applied to the construction of heart valves (Fig. 5.4). Cell sheet technology comprises a solid scaffold-free self-assembly process that utilizes stacked or rolled layers of engineered tissue fused to form thicker constructs. In addition to building heart valves, the technology has been used to build the first completely biological tissue-engineered vascular graft (see “Printing Heart Patches”).

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