BioPrinted Hearts

Researchers at Stanford University are midway through a five-year US ${\$}$ 26.4 million "moonshot" project to develop the foundational technologies needed to bioprint new hearts using patients' own cells. Collaborators from 15 Stanford labs-including bioengineers, computational experts, electrical and mechanical engineers, surgeons, biologists, stem cell researchers, and developmental biologists-are working toward transplanting a manufactured heart into a pig by 2028. They must clear numerous hurdles to create a living, beating heart from scratch. So far, they have managed to increase stem cell production to "organ scale" and have developed a novel new technology for printing tissues and their vascular structures within a semi-solid gel. They are now puzzling out how to resolve issues with supporting that bioprinted tissue through synthesized vascular trees. The team recently finished developing a novel 3-D printer that can make tissue as complex as a heart fast enough that the cells will survive the printing process long enough to be connected to support structures to keep the resulting organ alive.