Printing a living tissue construct with a 3D printer from the electronics store? Until now, this was impossible. Bioprinting required expensive specialised equipment. Researchers have now succeeded in modifying a simple 3D printer so that it can create biological structures at the touch of a button. This is an opportunity for small laboratories to conduct research in this area too.

Munich, September 13rd, 2024: The lame can walk, the blind can see is increasingly becoming a reality. Many are afraid of new, modern technologies, for others it means an end to suffering and the beginning of a life without constantly thinking about this one thing. Artificial tissue such as cartilage, bone or muscle tissue from a conventional 3D printer. This is what bioengineer Benedikt Kaufmann from the Centre for Applied Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine (CANTER) at Munich University of Applied Sciences calls „tissue engineering“.

The field is not new. For years, researchers have been working on producing organic structures from biomaterials and cells and preparing them for their future task through training.

„But despite all our successes, we are still a long way from our goal of producing customised tissue on a larger scale. In order to further develop tissue engineering, researchers around the world need to cooperate, generate and share knowledge,“ emphasises the researcher. However, technologies such as the printers required are still expensive. As a result, research is progressing more slowly than perhaps desirable. As part of his doctorate, Benedikt Kaufmann worked with the Technical University of Munich to modify a commercially available printer in such a way that living tissue can now be printed and made it accessible to everyone as an open source construction manual.

„The biggest challenge was creating suitable environmental conditions,“ recalls Kaufmann: „In addition to high humidity, you also need a constant 37 degrees Celsius to process proteins and cells.“ However, the researchers were now able to find suitable solutions for this. The printing process was just as problematic. While structures are still printed layer by layer in conventional printing, biomaterial is printed in the modified form of the printer via a suspension to which a glass plate can be attached. Biomaterials and cells can be printed directly onto this translucent plate and then analysed in high resolution under a microscope.

The very small printer works with masked stereolithography, a particularly cell-friendly process in which light from LEDs is projected through a liquid crystal display – similar to that of a mobile phone or computer monitor – onto the glass platelet wetted with a gelatine-like hydrogel according to a pre-programmed pattern. Individual pixels of the display are activated in a targeted manner, ensuring that the proteins in the hydrogel cross-link and harden at precisely the desired points – creating a three-dimensional structure layer by layer.

„Our experiments have shown that the modified 3D printer can be used to produce organic structural scaffolds with varying degrees of rigidity – this is important because bone substance, for example, requires a higher degree of hardness than muscle tissue,“ says Kaufmann. It has now also been possible to integrate stem cells directly into the structures during the printing process.

Research teams can now convert a simple commercially available 3D printer into a bioprinter thanks to the building instructions available online. „No engineering expertise is required for this,“ emphasises Kaufmann. This paves the way for small laboratories to gain experience in the production, characterisation and optimisation of artificial tissue and to generate and share knowledge in order to further develop tissue engineering. The modified printer can even be used in schools to gain initial experience in 3D printing of biomaterials.

Original publication:

Benedikt K. Kaufmann, Matthias Rudolph, Markus Pechtl, Geronimo Wildenburg, Oliver Hayden, Hauke Clausen-Schaumann, Stefanie Sudhop, mSLAb – An open-source masked stereolithography (mSLA) bioprinter, HardwareX, Volume 19, 2024, e00543, ISSN 2468-0672. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ohx.2024.e00543

Further Information:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2468067224000373?via%3Dihub, Plan für den Umbau handelsüblicher Geräte zu Bioprintern
https://data.mendeley.com/datasets/kxt5sks9zs/1/files/8a2b5d6e-694a-470b-8751-3d… Videoanleitung
https://data.mendeley.com/datasets/kxt5sks9zs/1 Data Repository

PictureSource: Johanna Weber

Description: As good as with more expensive devices: In his dissertation, HM researcher Benedikt Kaufmann developed a cost-effective way of printing biostructures