International bioprinting workshop held hereby Dick PetersonPublic Relations Johann Gutenberg could never have imagined what would come of his printing press. His invention of moveable type, the idea of producing exact copies without painstakingly hand-coping word-for-word— that was his frontier. With the evolution of printing since its invention in the 1450s has come a new frontier—the “printing” of human organs, a process so removed from Gutenberg’s press that the intermediate steps challenge the imagination. The 2nd International Workshop on Bioprinting, Biopatterning and Bioassembly, held at MUSC in mid-March, celebrated its Gutenberg heritage and coalesced the creative skills of biologists and engineers. “We had speakers here from New Zealand, Japan, the UK, Germany, Romania and Singapore,” said workshop organizer Vladimir Mironov, Ph.D. “We tried to attract the best people in the field.” The best people in the field brought with them their ideas, their discoveries and their inventive genius, ranging from molecular design to printer design, from tissue engineering to engineering scaffolds on which to grow tissue, from building two-dimensional to three-dimensional organs, and the role of stem cells in the creation of replacement organs. “We must let all flowers bloom,” Mironov said, explaining the value of the workshop in promoting collaboration and energizing the field. He said that the workshop identified the state of the art by discussing the challenges that researchers and engineers have to overcome. Also, as the workshop’s title implies, the field of “bio-printing, bio-patterning and bio- assembly” is not a narrow field. It draws on the expertise of biologists, engineers, computer hardware and software designers, and technological equipment manufacturers. “One company in Oklahoma has even begun asking for ‘bioprintists,’ but there’s not even a job description,” Mironov said. “This means we must begin thinking about how to train bioprintists.” The field also demands cooperation with industry to develop the needed tools. He said that companies like Canon, Epson and other ink jet printer manufacturers are already developing printers that deposit and overlay molecules and cells on bio-friendly surfaces instead of ink on paper. In addition to the educational and industrial demands of the field are the medical applications, Mironov said. To print cartilage, for example, requires scaffolding to provide temporary support to the cells and later dissolve. “We hope this new field of study will eventually solve the huge demand and severe shortage of replacement organs,” Mironov said. He predicted that in the future, with present challenges overcome, three-dimensional organs such as kidneys will be personalized for the patients who will use them. It will demand an integration of three-dimensional imaging and computer-aided design (CAD), he said. As for challenges, he said the high temperatures of the ink jet printers have to be avoided, new stimuli-sensitive fast polymerizing intelligent hydrogels must be synthesized, autologous cells that lack immune response are a must, and stem cells that can differentiate into the specialized cells of an organ need further study. “You can print something that looks like an organ, but isn’t solid,” Mironov said, “so accelerated tissue and organ maturation is another big challenge.” Mironov envisions the creation of a professional society in the field of bio-printing, bio-patterning and bio-assembly. Eventually there will be a critical mass of people in a field which now counts only about 50. Will there be an International Bioprinting Society (IBS)? Maybe so.
Friday, April 8, 2005
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