Hal Jones; Dan Schindler; Brynne Anderson; Mary Rosbach; Chandler Warr, Brigham Young University
One of the most pressing needs within the medical community is the demand for transplantable organs. On average, a name is added to the waiting list for an organ every 10 minutes in the United States, and 22 people per day on average die waiting for a transplant. Even if a patient receives an organ, the risks associated with the transplant are high -- from the immunosuppressant drugs required to the risk of graft-versus-host disease (GvHD). If organs could be engineered using a patient’s own cellular material, transplants could take place without the risk of GvHD or the need for immunosuppressants. One of the keys to creating any organ is first building a vascular network that could feed the surrounding tissue. This is where our research comes in. Our group is working to create fully functional and patient-specific blood vessels in vitro using a 3D printer. Our 3D-printed blood vessels could be used as the foundation for further tissue engineering or for transplants themselves. In this research, we use the freeform reversible embedding of suspended hydrogels (FRESH) printing method developed by TJ Hinton at Carnegie Mellon University. With the FRESH method, we will 3D print vascular networks of collagen. Successfully implanting said vascularized networks in patients will be made much more achievable by our being able to create a FRESH slurry which is sterile, providing an environment in which human umbilical vein cells (HUVECs) pervading the collagen can grow. In this presentation, I will discuss the progress my team has made in reaching the aforementioned goal. The vitality of the HUVECs will be reported on as a metric of our ability to produce a sterile slurry.