{"id":26025,"date":"2014-12-22T12:47:08","date_gmt":"2014-12-22T17:47:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sciencebusiness.technewslit.com\/?p=26025"},"modified":"2016-06-11T12:40:48","modified_gmt":"2016-06-11T16:40:48","slug":"3-d-tissue-assembly-system-designed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/technewslit.com\/sciencebusiness\/?p=26025","title":{"rendered":"3-D Tissue Assembly System Designed"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Jeffrey<\/a>
Jeffrey Morgan (Brown University)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

22 December 2014. Medical and engineering researchers at Brown University<\/a> in Providence developed a system that puts together synthetic tissue components into larger tissue assemblies, a step in the creation of synthetic organs. A description of the system from the lab of Brown bioengineering professor Jeffrey Morgan<\/a> was published on Saturday in the journal Tissue Engineering Part C<\/em><\/a> (paid subscription required).<\/p>\n

The university says it filed for a patent on the process, and Morgan recently founded the company Microtissues Inc.<\/a> in Providence to take inventions from his lab to market.<\/p>\n

Morgan and first author Andrew Blakely, now a surgeon at Rhode Island Hospital, developed the system to apply advances in electronic semiconductor assembly to tissue engineering, namely selection, placement, and connection of pre-made components into microchip devices. The technique they call bio-pick, place, and perfuse or Bio-P3 is an extension of the lab’s research creating small tissue parts in standard rod, sphere, and ring shapes, then inducing their self-assembly into more complex shapes, such as honeycombs. These parts are grown in molds without a scaffold or matrix, simplifying their design.<\/p>\n

In their paper, Morgan, Blakely, and colleagues demonstrate a prototype system that picks and places the tissue parts into larger pieces of live tissue, while keeping the assembled piece infused with fluid. The system has a clear plastic box with two chambers, one for storing the tissue components and the other for building the new piece of tissue. A nozzle uses gentle suction to pick up and release the tissue components, as well as provide fluid and nutrients for the new tissue assembly.<\/p>\n

With the prototype, an operator uses the nozzle pump to manually move a component from the parts chamber to the assembly chamber. The team says later versions will have an automated system for picking, moving, and placing the parts.<\/p>\n

In the paper, the researchers report creating a tissue tube by stacking 16 doughnut-like rings around a post. In about 2 days, the rings fused together to create the tube. The team reports as well that they stacked and fused four honeycomb pieces, each with about 250,000 cells, into a single slab about 2 millimeters thick. The structures use cells from liver and ovarian tissue, as well as breast cancer cells.<\/p>\n

Morgan says in a university statement, Bio-P3 is an advance over 3-D printing to create engineered tissue. “In contrast to 3-D bioprinting that prints one small drop at a time,” notes Morgan, “our approach is much faster because it uses pre-assembled living building parts with functional shapes and a thousand times more cells per part.”<\/p>\n

In August 2014, Morgan’s lab received a 3-year $1.4 million grant from National Science Foundation<\/a> to build an automated Bio-P3 system for tissue and organ engineering.<\/p>\n

Blakely demonstrates and tells more about Bio-P3 in the following video.<\/p>\n