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Three-dimensional printing is most commonly known for expediting prototyping processes in manufacturing. Using computer-aided design software (CAD), engineers or designers create digital models of the product in precise cross-sections known as layers. Using materials such as liquid polymers, gels, or resins, the 3D printer brings the product to life layer-by-layer with extraordinary precision, creating a three-dimensional structure ready for testing or sale.
The speed, precision, and possibility demonstrated by 3D printing has not escaped the notice of the regenerative medicine branch of bioengineering. Bioprinting, an emerging technology for creating living tissue and organs in the lab, is one way in which biomedical engineers are exploring how to solve the soaring demand for organ transplants.
While there are some similarities between 3D manufacturing and 3D bioprinting, printing organs that function in the human body requires knowledge and technology extending far beyond the typical 3D printing process. Instead of plastics, the material used for bioprinting is known as bioink—a complex mixture of natural polymers, synthetic polymers, and human cells. Scientists must then create a scaffold—i.e., the skeleton structure that mimics the structure found in living organs—upon which living cells are printed so they can grow into the organ. Following growth, the scaffold must fall away and the organ must be successfully implanted into the body.
This complex specifications of a functioning organ is why organ bioprinting is a solution of the future. However, biomedical engineers are already beginning to overcome some challenges, bringing us closer to being able to recreate organs using 3D printing technology. Dr. Anthony Atala, the director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, is one of the scientists doing cutting edge research that may someday open up the possibility of growing fully-functional, lab-generated organs using 3D printing technology.
In 2006, Dr. Atala and his team were the first to successfully transplant a lab-grown organ into a human host. They implanted lab-grown bladders into young people suffering from poor bladder function due to a congenital birth defect. Ten years of research and implementation later, Dr. Atala and his team have developed a 3D printer capable of creating muscle, cartilage, and bone. Known as the Integrated Tissue and Organ Printing (ITOP) System, Dr. Atala’s team has been successful in printing tissues that, when implanted into rodents, grow, thrive, and have been shown to sprout new systems of blood vessels.
Currently, no lab has been able to 3D print blood vessels and capillaries capable of sustaining an organ. However, with the promising developments in Dr. Atala’s current research coupled with new insights harnessing the capacity of cells to self-organize, some experts believe that, eventually, this barrier will be overcome. Until then, the race to 3D print a fully functioning organ will lead to lesser breakthroughs in the near future the will improve countless lives in the interim (e.g., skin printing on demand).
Since 1979, transdermal patches for pharmaceutical delivery have opened up new possibility to improve human health. In the time since the first commercially available patches helped people with motion sickness, patches have evolved to help with a wide variety of ailments or preventative care. Transdermal nicotine patches can help smokers to quit; ortho evra—the birth control patch—can help to prevent unwanted pregnancy when used correctly; and transdermal analgesic patches can help to relieve minor or severe pain.
Both patches and their applications are evolving quickly, and Dr. Chen Peng and his team at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, are using these developments to tackle the obesity epidemic. Using specially designed transdermal patches loaded with anti-obesity compounds normally administered orally or through injection, Dr. Peng and his team have shown that calorie-storing white fat can be transformed into calorie-burning brown fat in lab mice.
The patch design is novel, and enables Dr. Peng’s team to deliver the anti-obesity compounds painlessly and bloodlessy. The hundreds of microneedles—needles with a diameter less than that of a human hair—are filled with anti-obesity agents (β3-adrenoceptor agonist or thyroid hormone T3). When pressed against the skin for two minutes, the microneedles embed inside the skin of the mouse. As the needles dissolve, the anti-obesity agent is slowly released into the system. Over the course of four weeks, fat mass in the mice decreased by 30 percent, weight gain was suppressed, and treated mice had lower blood cholesterol and fatty acids than untreated mice.
Dr. Peng and his team believe that with time and continued research, these findings could be applied to the human obesity epidemic. The cost of materials production is low and side effects are reduced because less drug is needed when administered through the patch; also, the method can lower the barriers to access by enabling long-term, home-based treatment.
The sci-fi classic, Dune, featured the “stillsuit:” a full-body suit designed to keep the wearer cool and recycle the body’s waste to ensure the person stayed temperature-regulated, hydrated, and, therefore, alive, even in the hottest planetary climates. This wild fantasy of what can happen at the intersection of fashion and technology is known in bioengineering as “wearable technology.”
Joseph Wang, a professor of Nanotechnology and the director of the Center for Wearable Sensors at the University of California San Diego, is leading a team to develop technology that takes us one step closer to a stillsuit.
In a project known as Adaptive Textiles Technology with Active Cooling and Heating (ATTACH), Wang’s team’s goal is to create a personal heating/cooling system that responds to changes in ambient temperature, to changes in the individual’s body temperature, and to commands for on-demand heating and cooling. This marvel of bioengineering requires an impressive array of technologies working together to create the desired output of individualized temperature control. To keep the wearer at a comfortable 93 degrees fahrenheit, the ATTACH system comprises two textile systems: passive and active.
The passive textile system, consisting of special polymers and humidity-responsive flaps, enables the fabric to expand when it’s hot or contract when it’s cold. The passive textiles system is able to respond—without power—to small temperature variations depending on the temperature of the room, the wearer’s body temperature, or how much the wearer is sweating.
For larger temperature variations, Wang’s team is developing a synergistic active textiles system to increase the heating and cooling capacity of the fabric. When the passive system becomes overloaded or has reached capacity, a thermoelectrics system powered by rechargeable batteries and biofuel cells harvesting power from human sweat, works together with the passive system to regulate the temperature of the wearer.
If this synergistic system of textiles, sweat-powered biofuel cells, and nanotechnology weren’t already awe-inspiring enough, Wang’s team also plans to have everything produced through 3D printing to keep costs low. When ATTACH eventually makes it way to the market, there is also a plan for the clothing to feel comfortable, flexible, and lightweight.
Wang is hopeful that the fabric will help reduce the cost of heating buildings. By enabling wearers to keep temperature regulated on an individual level, buildings using HVAC systems for heating and cooling may be able to reduce costs by up to 15 percent. Beyond cost-savings, future uses could also include relief for those with temperature-related joint and other systemic pain.
Helping people regain movement through brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) is already a reality. By capturing and translating electrical signals from the brain, remnant muscle fiber, or the spinal cord, BCIs are already helping those with missing limbs to regain some measure of mobility. Currently, many BCIs utilize supervised decoders to translate the electrical signal into movement. These decoders require meticulously gathered data about body positioning captured simultaneously with neural activity. The gathering and subsequent training of the decoders for movement is time-consuming.
Eva Dyer, a neuroscientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, is aiming to reduce the amount of time it takes to program a BCI for movement. Dyer and her team are using a cryptography-inspired strategy, developing an algorithm for neural decoding that relies on translating brain activity into movement at the level of the pattern. Currently running testing on monkeys, Dyer and her team have been able to use collected movement data to create an algorithm for BCIs that is predictive and shows great promise.
Electrode arrays implanted in the brains of macaque monkeys recorded neural activity while the monkeys used their arms to guide a cursor to targets. In addition to brain activity, movement data was collected as well. Following analysis, computational models were tested to find a decoder algorithm that created the most alignment between the brain patterns and movement patterns.
When the algorithm was tested, Dyer’s team found that movement prediction performance was equal to that of simple supervised decoders. Additionally, the strategy of utilizing general statistics about movements for the decoder garnered a result where one monkey’s data could be used to help decipher movement patterns based on another monkey’s neural patterns. If developed further, this has the implication of reducing the data collection burden currently required for traditional decoders to work because researchers would only need one movement set in order to program BCI devices for multiple beings.
While Dyer notes that this cryptographic strategy is not yet producing algorithms that can compete with existing cutting edge decoder technology, it could be strengthened with more robust neural and movement data. If this method can reproduce the smooth, complex movements of biological limbs, this feat of bioengineering could lower the cost of BCIs to make them more accessible to those in need.
At the scale of one-billionth of a meter—one-millionth of the length of an ant—nanotechnology is a field wherein human lives are improved at the level of atoms and molecules. Nanorobots are machines that can manipulate environments and biological matter at an atomic level. With enormous implications for the future how diseases are treated, scientists in the nanorobotics field are looking to expand our capacity to respond to disease by asking, “How can we use robots to more effectively fight disease?”
Ajay Vikram Singh, a researcher in the Physical Intelligence Department of the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, is studying potential theranostic applications of mobile microbots—untethered microrobots that can move within the body autonomously or through remote-controlled systems. With an army of microrobots comes the capacity for targeted drug delivery systems (TTDS), methods that deliver pharmaceutical agents directly to the site where they’re needed.
Medicines taken orally or through injection must pass through the human body systemically, leading to side-effects and variations in the of concentration of drug delivered following the journey through the bloodstream. Because targeted drug delivery systems are capable of administering the drug directly to the desired point of pathology, Singh estimates that localized delivery through TTDS has the capacity to minimize these side effects while ensuring constancy in drug concentrations. In addition, on the patient side, microbot-delivered drugs can improve patient experiences by reducing the amount of drug needed and making compliance simpler.
There are varying practical applications for a corps of microbots that can be controlled through heat, ultrasound, and magnet technology, according to Dr. Singh. Just looking at applications in cancer, the microbots could be used to cut off blood supply to malignant tumors, locally administer radiation or chemotherapy, or even raise the temperature of a tumor to above 45 degrees celsius, resulting in tumor cell death. Dr. Singh also notes that microbots can be used to deliver treatment or run diagnostics in parts of the body formerly inaccessible to current technologies and medicines.
Regardless of whether scientists want to tackle disease, create clothing that monitors body systems, or extend people’s quality of life into later years, making tech smaller and figuring out how to use a 3D printer for production will be a part of the journey. Miniaturization is a key development needed for wearable technology, as well as for delivering meds in vivo, designing sensors for brain-controlled prosthetics, and creating microneedles for drug-delivery systems. Three-dimensional printing likely will become integral to creating human organs and producing the intricate circuitry of temperature-controlled clothing.
Overall, the future of biomedical engineering is replete with opportunities for engineering professionals interested in enhancing human health, especially those willing to invest in knowledge of miniaturization and 3D printing.
Becca is building a better future on a thriving earth by fostering healing, human wholeness, and next-world building through storytelling help, one-on-one self-awareness workshops, and customized team-alignment sessions. She offers these services at a rate of $0.00 to anyone interested (contact her at [email protected] for more information). Previously to her journey as an adventurer for a just, meaningful, and regenerative world, Becca was a formally trained sexuality educator with a master of education.
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