3-D printer to produce artificial ‘living tissues’
Oxford scientists have developed a custom-built programmable 3D printer to create artificial living tissues.
The new type of material used in the printer consists of thousands of connected water droplets, encapsulated within lipid films, which can perform several of the functions of the cells inside our bodies.
These printed “droplet networks” could be used for delivering drugs to places where they are needed and potentially one day replacing or interfacing with damaged human tissues. Because droplet networks are entirely synthetic, have no genome and do not replicate, they avoid some of the problems associated with other approaches to creating artificial tissues — such as those that use stem cells.
The team reported their findings in the journal Science.
“We aren’t trying to make materials that faithfully resemble tissues but rather structures that can carry out the functions of tissues,” said Professor Hagan Bayley of Oxford University’s Department of Chemistry, who led the research.
“We’ve shown that it is possible to create networks of tens of thousands of connected droplets,” said Bayley.
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