Development of bioink formulation for 3D printing of tissue models

每个人都在某种程度上需要药物来治疗疾病。在用于治疗人类之前，它们先在动物身上进行了测试。当涉及到人类对药物的反应时，动物试验是昂贵的、不道德的和不准确的。然而，它是临床试验前药物筛选的首选方法。9215581 Canada Inc. （Ourotech）的目标是通过3D打印人体组织来解决这个问题，这些组织更能代表药物对人类的影响，而且不需要动物实验。Ourotech正在创建一种注射器中的生物墨水，可以连接到任何3D打印机/点胶系统上，以3D打印活的人体细胞。墨水包含了保护、打印、发送信号和喂养细胞所需的一切，所以制药公司只需要添加细胞，打印后培养，然后测试他们的药物。该项目主要研究生物链的主要成分，即用于制造3D水凝胶支架的可交联聚合物。这是Ourotech和滑铁卢大学唐实验室的首次合作。这笔资金将支持化学方法的开发，以产生新型透明质酸基聚合物，这种聚合物在两阶段过程中交联，从而实现生物相容性打印和3D结构硬化。这项技术将导致油墨配方可能用于创建各种癌症模型，如肺癌、卵巢癌、前列腺癌，以及潜在的脑癌。

Everyone has needed pharmaceuticals at some point for an illness. Before they were used to treat humans, they were tested on animals. Animal testing is expensive, unethical and inaccurate when it comes to human responses to drugs. Yet, it is the method of choice for drug screening prior to clinical trial. 9215581 Canada Inc. (Ourotech) is aiming to solve this problem by 3D printing human tissues that are more representative of drug effects on humans and do not require animal experimentation. Ourotech is creating a bioink in a syringe that can be attached to any 3D printer/dispensing system to 3D print living human cells. The inks contain everything necessary to protect, print, signal and feed cells, so pharmaceutical companies just need to add the cells, culture after printing, and test their drugs. The proposed project focuses on a main ingredient of the bioink, which is the crosslinkable polymer for making 3D hydrogel scaffolds. This is the first joint effort between Ourotech and the Tang lab at the University of Waterloo. The funding will support the development of chemical approaches to generate novel hyaluronic acid-based polymers, which crosslink in a two-stage process, and thus enable biocompatible printing and hardening of 3D structures. This technology will lead to ink formulations that can potentially be used to create various cancer models, such as lung cancer, ovarian cancer, prostate cancer, and potentially brain cancer.