World's smallest 3D bioprinter could rebuild tissue during surgery

"Inspired by the world's largest land animal, researchers have created and tested what they say is the world's smallest 3D bioprinter. The device - which sports a 2.7-millimetre-wide print head at the end of a long, flexible arm that moves like an elephant's trunk - might one day assist physicians by delivering healing hydrogels during surgery. In a report published on 29 October in the journal Device, the researchers proved that the device could be fed through a physician's surgical scope to deposit hydrogel onto an artificial set of vocal cords."

"After undergoing surgery to remove cysts or growths from their vocal cords, people sometimes have difficulty speaking because their vocal folds scar and become stiff. Studies have shown that injecting hydrogels - which can be shaped to mimic the vocal cords' natural structure and support new tissue as it grows - boosts the healing process. But surgeons have had a hard time delivering the biomaterials with precision because their view into the throat is limited."

"Swen Groen, a biomedical engineer at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, wondered whether the natural world might offer a solution to this problem. Perhaps a soft robotic arm that moved like an elephant's trunk could be miniaturized to aid surgeons without blocking their view? Groen and his colleagues first designed a prototype that was 8 millimetres in diameter. Then, they shrunk the design to fit more easily through the one-centimetre-wide scope that surgeons use for operations, and demonstrated that it could precisely deliver dollops of hyaluronic-acid-based hydrogels to fill in gaps in artificial vocal folds, which are"

A 2.7-millimetre-wide bioprinter features a long, flexible arm that moves like an elephant's trunk and fits through a one-centimetre surgical scope. The print head can deposit hyaluronic-acid-based hydrogels directly onto artificial vocal folds. Hydrogels can mimic vocal-cord structure and support new tissue growth to reduce scarring and stiffness after surgery. Limited surgical views have made precise internal delivery of biomaterials difficult. A miniaturized soft-robotic arm evolved from an 8-millimetre prototype to a smaller device that demonstrated precise delivery of hydrogel dollops into gaps in artificial vocal folds.

Read at Nature