Advanced Monitoring Tools for Reproducible Hydrogels 3D-Printing for Medical and Clinical Applications

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Advanced materials, showing unconventional and extreme properties are becoming the key factors for generating and pushing innovation in a number of fields, including biomedical, industrial, chemical, mechanical, pharmaceutical, and optical thus guaranteeing competitiveness and impacting the economic growth. One of the most recent, versatile and high-potential material processing techniques is without any doubt additive manufacturing. 3D Printing or 3D Bio-printing of polymeric gels or blends of polymeric gels and cells constitute two innovative routes for fabricating specimens with tailored composition making possible to generate compositional gradients of cells into the same specimens. With this technique, it is potentially possible to confer new features such as higher resistance or biological attractiveness towards selected cells, to a wide range of substrates, in a non-homogenous way and across the specimen geometry. The equipment that we propose to acquire through this NSERC RTI proposal includes two easy-to-use instruments that will be integrated in one 3D printing system: one enabling the non-contact characterization of the elastic properties; the second one for measuring the level of oxygen and the temperature of gels or gels/cell blends. The idea is to explore the potential of 3D-printing for generating cell-containing structures for medical and clinical applications. The urgent clinical need for structures and scaffolds susceptible to restore, repair or regenerate body functions and tissue fully justify this research. Flat membranes for wound healing, cylindrical scaffolds for 3D modeling patho-physiological functions for new personalised drug development, proactive coatings for dental implants, antibacterial surfaces for devices and surgical tools, cancer cell-containing hydrogel phantoms for testing new oncological procedures, and other clinical applications will greatly benefit from the development of a new class of 3D-printed structures with tailored gradients. This will allow developing personalized devices for each class of diseased patient and depending from his/her pathology and envisaged clinical treatment. The requested instruments will meet most of the material development requirements of the members of the proposed team for the development of a wide variety of materials and surfaces spanning from biomaterials and medical devices (for the regeneration, replacement, reconstruction, and preclinical testing of diseased tissues and organs) to industrial products (antibacterial, others), to name only a few. This will strongly help the proposed team to competitively demonstrate the value of their fundamental research works on materials for health. The infrastructure is expected to facilitate the application of the of their discovery research results toward innovation thus valorizing the output of the researches and exploring the potential to become true products for the benefit of the Society.