July 21, 2015 | By Alec
Medical applications of 3D printing applications are, in a single word, revolutionary. However, all existing applications are almost universally applied to very rare or even unique medical conditions, such as 3D printed titanium implants specifically fitting your skull. However, a team of researchers from the Binghamton University in New York State are being very ambitious by developing a 3D printing process that could be used to cure a number of preventable diseases such as diabetes.
This ambitious project is being led by biomedical engineering professors Kaiming Ye and Sha Jin, and essentially revolves around 3D printing functional 3D models of the pancreas. These can then be used as vessels in which crucial cells can be ‘grown’. This is especially useful for the growth of, for instance, the islet cells that produce insulin. Diabetes patients are no longer capable of producing their own insulin, but the implantation of cells grown in a laboratory could essentially cure them from this increasingly prevalent disease.
And as professor Ye explains, 3D printing is a key instrument in realizing this ambitious plan. While scientists have previously been very successful in growing cells in laboratories, the cell cultures necessary for a lot of applications grow on a 3D scale, rather than the 2D of a petri dish environment. The 3D printing of a functional environment resembling real human organs (in this case the pancreas) could give scientists a 3D printed factory of necessary cells.
When specifically talking about patients with diabetes, ‘mass production’ of these cells is exactly what they need. ‘The most efficient treatment for diabetes is islet transplantations,’ Ye said. "However, because of the scarcity of donors, islet transplantations are not available to the majority of diabetic patients.’ A 3D printed pancreas-like environment could solve this problem easily.
Now this all sounds fantastic, but the Binghamton team is still far from realizing this ambitious approach to an increasingly common disease. The first and most important step, obviously, is the 3D printing of a living organ. To do so, Jin’s laboratory is working on a vascular system complete with blood-pumping vessels that continue to send oxygen and nutrients to the cells. Secondly, the team is still looking for the magic stuff capable of producing the pure islet cells needed to manufacture insulin. The solution could be offered by pluripotent stem cells, which should have the capacity to turn into islet cells as well.
A lot of interesting things are thus happening over at the biomedical department of Binghamton University, and a $300,000 grant from the National Science Foundation should help Ye, Jin and company to go far with this experiment. 'The number of diabetes patients goes up every year, so the prevalence of diabetes is a big problem,’ Ye said. ‘This research could provide an unlimited cell source for islet transplantation.’ Personalized medical treatment, in short, is in greater demand than ever before, and 3D printing will play a very important role in realizing that.
Posted in 3D Printing Applications
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They are a great platform to get into 3D printing. Building from the core of a commercially available (open source) printer, we use RAMPS electronics, wrote our own host software from scratch, and create a host of interesting extruders for pastes and droplets, UV crosslinking and sterilization, and a lot more. It was, and continues to be, a fun build!
Frank wrote at 7/22/2015 11:34:55 AM:
Interesting to see how standard commercial low cost printers (Ultimaker 2) are rebranded by these groups to sell it off to non experts
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