CMU Engineers Find Innovative Way to Make a Low-Cost 3D Bioprinter

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Starting with a MakerBot 3D printer, researchers tapped open-source hardware and software to build an affordable piece of tech that can print laboratory-grown cells on a large scale.

While 3D printers have already caused quite a buzz in the healthcare field — facilitating difficult surgeries and opening the door to low-cost prosthetics — the concept of bioprinting on a large scale has eluded the industry for the most part. But a recent breakthrough from Carnegie Mellon University’s College of Engineering could change all that.

Bioprinting, or printing laboratory-grown cells in order to form living structures, has the ability to profoundly transform healthcare.

“The approach could revolutionize regenerative medicine, enabling the production of complex tissues and cartilage that would potentially support, repair or augment diseased and damaged areas of the body,” Science Daily reports.

While researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and elsewhere have been digging into how to facilitate low-cost bioprinting, these options are often limited in scale or availability. The new open-source and low-cost solution from CMU, which makes use of a standard desktop 3D printer, could open the door to printing biomaterials, like artificial human tissue, and fluids on a larger scale, according to a new paper released by CMU.

“Bioprinting has historically been limited in volume, so essentially the goal is to just scale up the process without sacrificing detail and quality of the print,” Kira Pusch, an author of the paper and a recent graduate of CMU’s Materials Science and Engineering undergraduate program, tells CMU’s news site. “What we’ve created is a large volume syringe pump extruder that works with almost any open source fused deposition modeling (FDM) printer. This means that it’s an inexpensive and relatively easy adaptation for people who use 3-D printers.”

Open-Source Tools Lead to a ‘Democratizing’ Bioprinter

What makes the CMU bioprinting method unique is a technique the lab developed called Freeform Reversible Embedding of Suspended Hydrogels (FRESH) 3D bioprinting that is designed to specifically print “soft and living materials,” Adam Feinberg, another author of the paper and an associate professor of materials science and biomedical engineering at CMU, tells Robotics Tomorrow. The technique essentially prints the tissue in a gel that is later carefully melted away to ensure the cells remain viable.

Feinberg notes that the technique is capable of printing a wide range of cells “including collagen and other extracellular matrix proteins,” representing most tissue in the body.

“Usually there’s a trade-off, because when the systems dispense smaller amounts of material, we have more control and can print small items with high resolution, but as systems get bigger, various challenges arise,” Feinberg, who is also a member of the Bioengineered Organs Initiative at Carnegie Mellon, tells CMU’s news site. “The [large-volume extruder (LVE)] 3-D bioprinter allows us to print much larger tissue scaffolds, at the scale of an entire human heart, with high quality.”

The lab began its journey toward large-scale and low-cost bioprinting after it purchased a MakerBot 3D printer. Over the course of six years, researchers modified the printer using open-source hardware and software. In the spirit of that endeavor, the team has made its designs for the printer open source, hoping to further collaboration and discovery in the medical field.

“Essentially, we’ve developed a bioprinter that you can build for under $500, that I would argue is at least on par with many that cost far more money,” Feinberg tells CMU’s news site. “Most 3-D bioprinters start between $10,000 and $20,000. This is significantly cheaper, and we provide very detailed instructional videos. It’s really about democratizing technology and trying to get it into more people’s hands.”

ORIGINAL: Health Tech Magazine

by Juliet Van Wagenen

Juliet is the senior web editor for StateTech and HealthTech magazines. In her six years as a journalist she has covered everything from aerospace to indie music reviews — but she is unfailingly partial to covering technology.

Scientists develop ‘nanopores’ that inexpensively filter the salt out of seawater

Mohammad Heiranian/University of Illinois

Just think what this could mean.

There’s filtration and then there’s filtration. Engineers in the US have been working on the latter, coming up with a new markedly more energy-efficient way of taking the salt out of seawater, which could deliver huge advantages in terms of providing people with access to drinking water and help combat problems like drought.

The researchers have developed a material that allows high volumes of water to pass through extremely tiny holes called ‘nanopores’ while blocking salt and other contaminants. The material they’re using – a nanometre-thick sheet of molybdenum disulphide (MoS2) riddled with these nanopore holes – is the most efficient of a number of thin-film membranes that the engineers modelled, filtering up to 70 percent more water than graphene.

“Even though we have a lot of water on this planet, there is very little that is drinkable,” said Narayana Aluru, a professor of mechanical science and engineering at the University of Illinois and leader of the study. “If we could find a low-cost, efficient way to purify sea water, we would be making good strides in solving the water crisis."

Molybdenum disulphide coupled with nanopores could be that solution. While desalination isn’t a new concept, the efficiency gains with this kind of new material – both in terms of the energy required to make the filtration work, and also the cost of keeping a desalination system running – could make a world of difference when it comes to processing large amounts of seawater.

“Finding materials for efficient desalination has been a big issue, and I think this work lays the foundation for next-generation materials,” said Aluru. “These materials are efficient in terms of energy usage and fouling, which are issues that have plagued desalination technology for a long time.”

Conventional desalination relies on reverse osmosis to channel seawater through a thin plastic membrane, but the process suffers from a number of bottlenecks. While the membrane appears thin to the eye, from a microscopic perspective it’s more tube- or tunnel-like than a sheet that’s only a nanometre in thickness, which means it requires more pressure (and thus energy) to operate. They’re also susceptible to more clogging, which ramps up operational costs.

In comparison, the extreme thinness of the molybdenum disulphide membrane allows water to pass through with much less resistance, lessening or negating many of the above drawbacks. But the ingenuity behind the system isn’t just in its engineering.

“MoS2 has inherent advantages in that the molybdenum in the centre attracts water, then the sulphur on the other side pushes it away, so we have much higher rate of water going through the pore,” said Mohammad Heiranian, first author of the study. “It’s inherent in the chemistry of MoS2 and the geometry of the pore, so we don’t have to functionalise the pore, which is a very complex process with graphene.”

There you have it, folks – the world’s first thirsty water filter. We love it! The next steps for the researchers are partnering with manufacturers who can bring their modelled desalination technique to life. The first step will be testing, but they’re confident their findings – which are published in Nature Communications – could be applied on an industrial scale for everybody’s benefit.

“I’m in California now, and there’s a lot of talk about the drought and how to tackle it,“ said Amir Barati Farimani, a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University who worked on the research at Illinois as a graduate student. ”I’m very hopeful that this work can help the designers of desalination plants."

ORIGINAL: Science Alert

PETER DOCKRILL

12 NOV 2015