3D Bioprinting

At the beginning of the year, I said I would follow my curiosity. One of the things I was curious about was 3D bioprinting. What does that even mean? I talked to Dr. Mohammad Albanna, CEO and founder of Humabiologics to learn more.Imagine creating 3D structures from living cells and a biological matrix. Then imagine depositing the materials for that structure with an injet printer. I promise, I didn’t get this watching Netflix.Dr. Albanna described for me the story of Dr. Tony Atala who grew a replacement bladder for a boy from that boy’s own cells back in 2001. And that boy, Luke Massella is now a grown man with a lab-grown bladder that is working to this day.Indeed, early experiments involved cleaning out injet cartridges, replacing the ink with biological materials and loading them into a printer.Now there are a handful of people with a bladder like Luke’s. Creating organs, though, is complicated. Kidneys, for example, have 20 different types of cells within them. They all have a job to do and they need to be in the right place in the right numbers to function. Similarly for a heart, or a liver, you need to get nutrients and oxygen in and waste out, not to mention assemble structures that can withstand the force of pumping blood.Transplantation is the exception. There are more immediate uses of 3D bioprinting. One is creating tissue models to better understand disease. Another is for testing drugs in development for both toxicity and efficacy. What if we could test a panel of drugs against a patient’s tumor to see which works best? Combined with genomic analysis, we might be able to find the right therapies faster (and probably learn a lot in the process).Listen to the full episode to learn more about the mechanics of 3D bioprinting, the need for allogeneic off the shelf materials and what Dr. Albanna sees for the future.Thank you for reading cc: Life Science. This post is public so feel free to share it. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cclifescience.substack.com