Acquisition of a High-Resolution 3-D Bioprinter for an Interdisicplinary Research Team

温莎大学的一个高度跨学科的研究团队，包括聚合物，有机和材料化学家，细胞和系统生物学家，毒理学家以及材料和土木工程师，正在共同开发创新的新型生物墨水和支持材料，以增加生物打印实验的功能。该团队包括希望打印复杂类器官和器官系统的用户，包括肠道，以研究昼夜节律的影响，肝脏，以研究使用人类细胞的器官模型中的疾病发生和进展，以及加拿大动物方法替代中心，该中心专注于生成多个器官模型，以加速和改善药物和潜在毒素的评估。然而，这个团队不仅对生物打印感兴趣，而且对创新新材料感兴趣。这些包括“自分解”生物材料，可以根据命令解聚的塑料，用于加-减生物打印;将导电共轭聚合物集成到网络中，以将集成的传感器和/或微型设备提供到可植入电子设备中;通过组合的打印-金属沉积技术将柔性电子设备打印到生物基质中，以及将纳米电子设备打印和包含到类器官中用于生物分子检测。所有这些技术都需要出色的空间分辨率，以及可以使用的油墨类型的显著灵活性。其他创新包括开发涉及“视觉”输入神经网络的新控制模块，这将有助于用户避免失败的打印作业，这是生物打印研究中的头号成本。市场上的打印机对于这些目的来说不够灵活。所要求的微流体打印机是第一台能够满足这些研究人员所有要求的机器。这台生物打印机不仅将用于进行生物学、毒理学、生物技术和生物材料工程方面的创新实验，而且还将由一个非常强大的研究团队使用，该团队希望产生新的工具，大大扩展可以进行的实验，并提高打印过程的效率。

A highly interdisciplinary team of researchers at the University of Windsor including polymer, organic, and materials chemists, cell and systems biologists, toxicologists, and materials and civil engineers are working together to develop innovative new bioinks and support materials to increase the functionality of bio-printed experiments. This team includes users looking to print complex organoid, and organ systems including intestines to study the effect of circadian rhythms, livers to study disease initiation and progression in an organ model using human cells, and the Canadian Centre for Alternatives to Animal Methods, which is focused on generating multiple organ models to accelerate and improve the evaluation of drugs and potential toxins. However, this team is interested not only in bioprinting, but in innovating new materials. These include “self-immolative” biomaterials, plastics that can be depolymerized on command, for additive-subtractive bioprinting; integrating conductive conjugated polymers into networks to provide integrated sensors and/or micro devices into implantable electronics; the printing of flexible electronics into biological matrices though a combined printing-metal deposition technology, and the printing and inclusion of nanoelectronics into organoids for biomolecule detection. All of these technologies require excellent spatial resolution, and a significant flexibility in the types of inks that can be used. Additional innovations include the development of new controlling modules involving "vision"-input neural networks that will assist users in avoiding failed print jobs, the number one cost involved in bioprinting research. The printers on the market are not sufficiently flexible for these purposes. The requested microfluidic printer is the first machine capable of meeting all of the requirements of these researchers. This bioprinter will not only be used to carry out innovative experiments in biology, toxicology, biotechnology and biomaterial engineering, but will also be used by a very strong research team that looks to generate new tools that will greatly expand the possible experiments that can be conducted, and improve the efficiencies of printing processes more generally.