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3D printing has many uses when it comes to modifying the body and functionality. We have seen many auxiliary devices, prosthetic devices for medical instruments, and perhaps the most interesting are engineering-oriented research aimed at studying and repairing the organs of the human body. One group of Japanese researchers used bioprinting to create frameless tubular tissues made from multicellular spheroids (MCS), which consist of approximately 40% of the human umbilical vein (from endothelial cells), 10% of the human aorta (smooth muscle cells), and 50% of human (fibroblasts) skin. The team received 500 simulated and 3D-printed tubular fabrics based on MCS (what MCS is) around the needle structure, which acts as necessary support in the early stages of creation.
Before you accurately reproduce this fabric, there was a thorough preliminary study of 3D-design. The team had to first check the size of the spheroids, the shape and size of the tube using specials. software, making sure that the physical properties of the MCS-based tissue structure correspond to those in the body. After bringing the design to perfection, the spheroids were carefully crafted, picked up and loaded into the needle array. After four days of fusion on the needle frames, the needle array was removed since the fusion between it and the MCSs was completed to create a structurally frameless fabric material. The whole process can be seen in their project video.
The result of this MCS-based method was quite successful, because the team was able to create a tubular structure without supporting the scaffold, and had already tested a tissue implant in the abdominal aorta of their laboratory rats. Before implantation in rats, bioprinting tubular tissue was cultured in a perfusion system. While research is still ongoing, this team of bio-engineers is making bioprinting more popular, and I hope that bioprinting will help to understand the internal structure of the human body or allow the production of high-quality bioprinting implants.
