Medical research includes a lot of testing on tissues and cells, so a professor at Missouri University of Science and Technology in Rolla is developing a way to do that cheaper and easier by making a better "organ on a chip."
It's a device about the size of a playing card that lets researchers test how human tissues and cells respond to new medicines or treatments without testing on animals or people.
The technology has existed for a while, but Anthony Convertine, a professor of materials science and engineering at Missouri S&T, has developed a way to make them using regular, off-the-shelf 3D printers.
"The printers that we typically use, you can buy them off of amazon.com, they're typically used to make things like toys and prototyping. But these printers are actually very high resolution and they're really accessible," Convertine said. "We wanted it to be cheap and easy, because if it's not cheap and easy, people won't use it."
At the heart of Convertine's work is being able to dissolve away extra structures that are part of the process after printing to leave clean, precise microchannels for researchers to test and work with.
"We think this is going to be really useful in the fields of tissue engineering and also in creating more realistic models for a lot of diseases," he said.
Using the "organ on a chip" model also gives scientists options other than testing on animals and humans and making it as affordable as possible will help avoid those kinds of experiments.
The S&T research was featured as the cover article in a recent issue of the journal Biomaterials Science. Convertine and his team have other papers in the review process with hopes they will be published soon.
The next step is working on partnerships with bio printing companies to try to commercialize the technology. Convertine said he has already had inquiries from companies around the world to learn more about the process.
"I really do hope that we can bring about these new 'organ on a chip' models to really accurately model human diseases. And we're really excited. We're hoping universities around the country and industry will pick up this technology," Convertine said.
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