Researchers at the University of Buffalo unveiled their new 3D printing method with an amazing video that could soon show the future of fast artificial organ manufacturing.
The incredible seven-second video by the research team, which accelerates from 19 minutes, showing the pressure of a hand, which takes six hours to create using conventional 3D printing methods.
“The technology we’ve developed is 10-50 times faster than the industry standard, and it works with large sample sizes that were previously very difficult to achieve,” says the study’s co-lead author Ruogang Zhao, Ph.D., associate professor of biomedical engineering.
The technique is called stereolithography and uses hydrogen, a jelly-like agent used in the manufacture of cloths, contact lenses and, in particular, tissue engineering scaffolds.
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The University of Buffalo team has achieved centimeter-sized hydrogel models that reduce the deformation of structures sometimes found in other 3D printing methods.
According to co-lead author Chi Zhou, the team’s method would be ideal for printing cells with built-in vascular networks, which is a frightening prospect even now, but perhaps a more common medical technology in the near future.
This advancement in 3D printing is critical to the development of fully functioning 3D printing organs in an emerging intersection between the manufacturing and biomedical equipment industry that could save many lives around the world in the future. In 2018 alone, there were 146,840 organ transplants worldwide somewhere in the vicinity.
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