New 3D Bioprinter Could Build Replicas of Human Organs, Offering a Boost for Drug Discovery (Margherita Bassi, November 19, 2024, Smithsonian)
Currently, scientists have only limited ways to create tissue for testing pharmaceutical therapies, such as using lab-grown samples or by relying on traditional 3D bioprinting, per Popular Science’s Andrew Paul. However, cultivating organs in a lab is complex and expensive—and printing them is currently slow and prone to errors, such as positioning cells incorrectly.
“Incorrect cell positioning is a big reason most 3D bioprinters fail to produce structures that accurately represent human tissue,” David Collins, head of the Collins BioMicrosystems Laboratory at the University of Melbourne and a co-author of the study, says in a statement.
“But with our new approach,” Collins and two other researchers write in an article for Pursuit, “not only can we position cells with precision, we can also fabricate at a scale of single cells.”