FMSG: Bio: Rapid Bio-Printing of Hybrid Piezoelectric and Magnetostrictive Platforms for Tissue Engineering

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Tissue engineering is a biomedical engineering process that usually involves combining cells, biomolecules, scaffolds, and biologically interactive materials to maintain, restore, or improve tissues or organs. However, these manually made functional tissues have only limited use in human patients (e.g., artificial skin or cartilage). The challenges include innovating cost-efficient tooling engineering, creating materials with suitable biochemical and physicochemical factors, and sustainable platforms delivering in-situ diagnosis for directing the disease healing strategies. This Future Manufacturing Seed Grant (FMSG)-BioManufacturing project supports fundamental research for developing a new 3D printing technology to overcome some of these difficulties. For example, the newly developed printer can print multifunctional implants and scaffolds with high throughput and resolution, avoiding tedious tooling engineering. In addition, the newly invented biocompatible composites will also bring opportunities for various biomedical applications, such as tissue regeneration, neurotrauma treatment, and cancer curing. This project unites researchers with diverse expertise, including 3D printing, polymer science, nanoparticle engineering, and biomedical engineering. These investigators will also conduct STEM outreach at all levels, from K-12 public education to graduate course development. Significantly, the investigators will develop education-oriented TikTok/YouTube content to expose the most updated printing techniques to local and national K-12 students.Though 3D printing has been utilized to print piezoelectric or ferromagnetic composites separately, some bottlenecks remain. For example, conventionally 3D printed multiferroic magnetoelectric (ME) composites for biomedical uses have poor printability and limited efficiency in manufacturing fine features. This FMSG project aims to develop a new printing technology, named Multi-Scale and Multi-Material Continuous Liquid Interface Printing (MM-CLIP), by integrating scanning-projection and microfluidic flow control strategies. The MM-CLIP technology can enable scalable manufacturing of functional devices with increasingly small features and multiple materials, which have been the main challenge for the 3D printing field. With the MM-CLIP, multiferroic ME composites can be printed into hybrid piezoelectric and magnetostrictive platforms, i.e., multifunctional implants or tissue scaffolds, which can generate electrical signals from externally controlled magnetic fields that rarely attenuate in biosystems. An additional thrust is the multiphysics modeling framework for elucidating the ME coupling efficiencies of the printable composites and, thus, predicting and precisely controlling the electrical stimulation. In parallel, the project will systematically explore ME-induced electrical stimulation's effects on cell proliferation and correlates it to cell differentiation and growth factors. The iteration within the proof-of-concept studies will lead to optimal scaffold performance, and biomedical application is the ultimate goal of the multiferroic ME platforms. The research outcomes will facilitate the research on novel composites for application in regenerative medicine and multi-material bioprinting for the direct realization of functional implants.This Future Manufacturing award was supported by the Division of Civil, Mechanical, and Manufacturing Innovation.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.