Re-analyzing 3d bio printing

[William Heath]

Hi All,

I was reading in scientific american that they have finally conquered the problem of building the blood supplying vessicle structures for 3d printed organs.  They use sugar as the scaffold and create the vissicle structures with the organ etc...  This is very exciting as it means other non-trivial organs can be created and utilized besides bladders and skin, ears etc...  

I would give my kingdom to be part of this amazing revolution!  I think the major barrier to entry with 3d bio printing right now is that stupid printer nozel.  Can't we just have a simple piezo electric kind of cartridge that doesn't require an inkjet shield for an arduino?  Are there any other solutions for causing cells to eject out of some kind of encasement at a precise rate then using these massively complex printer cartridges that are not designed for this singular purpose?  If not how hard is it to create one?  As I understand it the pezo electric cartridge works like this:

In piezolelectric inkjet printers, an electrically actuated piezo element provides the slight expansion necessary to shove a droplet of ink out of the nozzle.

Most commercial and industrial inkjet printers and some consumer printers (those produced by Epson and Brother Industries) use a piezoelectric material in an ink-filled chamber behind each nozzle instead of a heating element. When a voltage is applied, the piezoelectric material changes shape, which generates a pressure pulse in the fluid forcing a droplet of ink from the nozzle. Piezoelectric (also called Piezo) inkjet allows a wider variety of inks than thermal inkjet as there is no requirement for a volatile component, and no issue with kogation (buildup of ink residue), but the print heads are more expensive to manufacture due to the use of piezoelectric material (usually PZT, lead zirconium titanate). A DOD process uses software that directs the heads to apply between zero to eight droplets of ink per dot, only where needed. Piezo inkjet technology is often used on production lines to mark products. For instance, the "use-before" date is often applied to products with this technique; in this application the head is stationary and the product moves past. Requirements of this application are high speed, a long service life, a relatively large gap between the print head and the substrate, and low operating cost.

Is it hard to do this:

1.  Use a reprap printer to print a kind of cartridge casing

2.  Putting some piezo electric material in it

3.  Hooking up some kind of chip that applies a current to this piezo electric material to cause a droplet to come out

We have the reprap so once we get an easy to use printer nozel/dispensor we can really begin to do 3d bio printing much easier.

-Tim

[Bryan Bishop]

On Fri, May 24, 2013 at 5:55 PM, William Heath <wgh...@gmail.com> wrote:

I was reading in scientific american that they have finally conquered the problem of building the blood supplying vessicle structures for 3d printed organs.  They use sugar as the scaffold and create the vissicle structures with the organ etc...  This is very exciting as it means other non-trivial organs can be created and utilized besides bladders and skin, ears etc...  

Jordan's work was about tissues, not organs.

- Bryan
http://heybryan.org/
1 512 203 0507

[Nathan McCorkle]

On Fri, May 24, 2013 at 3:55 PM, William Heath <wgh...@gmail.com> wrote:

> I would give my kingdom to be part of this amazing revolution! I think the
> major barrier to entry with 3d bio printing right now is that stupid printer
> nozel. Can't we just have a simple piezo electric kind of cartridge that
> doesn't require an inkjet shield for an arduino? Are there any other
> solutions for causing cells to eject out of some kind of encasement at a
> precise rate then using these massively complex printer cartridges that are
> not designed for this singular purpose? If not how hard is it to create
> one? As I understand it the pezo electric cartridge works like this:

> Is it hard to do this:
>
> 1. Use a reprap printer to print a kind of cartridge casing
> 2. Putting some piezo electric material in it
> 3. Hooking up some kind of chip that applies a current to this piezo
> electric material to cause a droplet to come out
>
> We have the reprap so once we get an easy to use printer nozel/dispensor we
> can really begin to do 3d bio printing much easier.

I'll let the bioPrinter group folks weigh in more on this, but an
econonmies-of-scale printer cartridge can be had in my neighborhood in
about 10-15 minutes during the day, and within about 25 minutes
24-hours-a-day. I can't say the same about a reprap/other 3D printer,
even factoring in round trip time, I might be able to beat the printer
finishing the job with the premade inkjet cartridge.

Maybe some standardization, like how cell phones are all USB now,
could shift the inkjet head industry to be a physically separate unit
from the ink storage tank. That way you can just buy the appropriate
head, and without getting ink everywhere taking it apart, you just
hook up your sterile cell tank.

Otherwise, I've seen piezo hack in some STM and SPM projects I believe.
http://www.geocities.com/spm_stm/disk_scanner.html

Some attempts at DIY piezo dispensers
http://hackteria.org/wiki/index.php/DIY_Micro_Dispensing_and_Bio_Printing#Micro-Dispensing
http://reprap.org/wiki/Scratchbuilt_Piezo_Printhead

Somewhat more apparently successful:
http://www.andaquartergetsyoucoffee.com/wp/?p=220
(which say get more details here)
http://forums.reprap.org/read.php?153,52959



--
-Nathan

[Open BioLab Graz - Austria]

Why not use a fine syringe like a hamilton syringe and move it with a stepper motor?

[Open BioLab Graz - Austria]

We're going to try that over here at least soon!

[Patrik D'haeseleer]

Jordan's printing of capillaries in spun sugar is a really cool hack, but I would definitely not consider printing th eblood supply a solved problem - plenty more work needed in that area. Not to mention getting proper innervation of tissues, directionality of muscle fibers, etc.

Piezo inkjet print heads are not inherently better than thermal print heads. Either way, you'll need some electronics to drive the print head. So you can either go with the InkShield and a thermal print head, or go with a piezo print head and brew your own driver shield.

If you want more flexibility, I would strongly recommend going with syringe pumps instead. We're currently building some syringe pumps based on cheap 1ml Eppendorf syringes and a $10 linear stepper motor. In theory, we should be able to do 1/2 ul per full step with this setup, or around 30 nl per microstep - not that we need or want volumes that small. And we should be able to print with gels with cells embedded in them, that maintain their shape in 3D after printing.

Patrik

[Brian Degger]

Gel chemistry is important . What you using ? Hydrogel?

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[William Heath]

Hi Patrick,

Everytime I see a post of yours I await to be pleasantly surprised at some elegant, inexpensive, practical solution or analysis!  You are restoring my faith in biologists :>  My next dumb question is wouldn't it be better for you to adapt/use the reprap machine to the purpose of 3d bio printing?  What are your arguments against that just curious?  I am sooooo grateful your moving away from this obfuscated/expensive approach of using printer cartridges!  I am in eager anticipation of bio printer 2.0 :>

-Tim

[Patrik D'haeseleer]

Hi Tim,

I think inkjet printing still has its place - especially for things such as printing a 2D pattern of growth factors over a layer of cells, Syringe pumps also have limitations with surface tension - you can achieve tiny droplets with an inkjet that would be impossible with a syringe pump, because you are literally jetting the droplets out of the print head.

In general, syringe pumps will give you more flexibility though. And yes, you can just mount them on your favorite 3D printer. We built our own $150 printer because we didn't already have a 3D printer and were too cheap to buy one ;-). But now that we've actually won a $1500 3D printer using our $150 bioprinter instructable, we do indeed plan to replace the plastic extrusion print head with a bio print head. It won't be a dedicated bioprinter though - we want to make sure we can still use it for regular 3D printing as well.

We've actually been eyeing the $200 MakiBox 3D printer to turn into a dedicated  bioprinting platform. No heated platform at that price, which suits us just fine. And it's fully enclosed in clear acrylic, meaning less chance of contamination and easy to clean...

Patrik

[Patrik D'haeseleer]

Sorry, forgot to add the link for the MakiBox 3D printer:

http://makibox.com/details/product/A6-LT

Patrik

[Koeng]

That looks awesome!

Post when you get more information, I would absolutely LOVE to make a bioprinter, that makibox looks so cool I am actually going to buy it :D Tell us if you make it a bioprinter, I would convert mine :3

[justin minck]

Has anyone successfully used the Makibox A6-LT in bio printing applications? 

[Patrik D'haeseleer]

I ordered one Feb. 2nd, but I'm still waiting. The website does warn about a 6-10 week lead time, so in theory - any day now...

I know they had tons of trouble ramping up production to get through the backlog of orders from their initial crowdfunding campaign. But they seem to be getting up to speed now, with close to 1500 units shipped.

Patrik

[Koeng]

I dunno when your's will come... I ordered mine in May (last year when it was a kickstarter) and I still haven't gotten mine

[Maria Chavez]

We do have two guys who come to our bioprinter project meeting that have modified a PrintrBot Simple, removing the extruder and replacing with a DIY 3d printed geared syringe pump.  I will sit with them to write up a review on using it at some point, as its $300, but overall they really hate alot about it, and its taken a fair bit of modifications.  They can print liquids but anything thicker is causing a problems for them although additional modifications they continue to make to the syringe system might help.

-Maria

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