By A. Tarantola

Skinks think they’re just sooooo cool. Through no shortage of effort on our part, humans still lack the physiological capacity to regrow lost limbs and damaged organs. Well, we didn’t until this week, at least. A pair of research teams from Wake Forest University’s Institute for Regenerative Medicine have topped NASA’s long-running Vascular Tissue Challenge by 3D printing a biologically viable chunk of human liver.

The teams, respectively dubbed Winston and WFIRM, each managed to produce a centimeter-square hunk-o-meat capable of surviving and nominally operating for a span of 30 days, albeit using divergent methodologies. Yeah, granted, even NASA admits that both teams relied on similar “3D printing technologies to create gel-like molds, or scaffolds, with a network of channels designed to maintain sufficient oxygen and nutrient levels to keep the constructed tissues alive,” they differed on their printing designs and materials. 

The high-throughput 3D bioprinting setup performing prints on a standard 96-well plate. Credit: Biofabrication

by University of California – San Diego

A 3-D printer that rapidly produces large batches of custom biological tissues could help make drug development faster and less costly. Nanoengineers at the University of California San Diego developed the high-throughput bioprinting technology, which 3-D prints with record speed—it can produce a 96-well array of living human tissue samples within 30 minutes. Having the ability to rapidly produce such samples could accelerate high-throughput preclinical drug screening and disease modeling, the researchers said.

The process for a pharmaceutical company to develop a new drug can take up to 15 years and cost up to $2.6 billion. It generally begins with screening tens of thousands of drug candidates in test tubes. Successful candidates then get tested in animals, and any that pass this stage move on to clinical trials. With any luck, one of these candidates will make it into the market as an FDA approved drug.

The high-throughput 3-D bioprinting technology developed at UC San Diego could accelerate the first steps of this process. It would enable drug developers to rapidly build up large quantities of human tissues on which they could test and weed out drug candidates much earlier.

by Michael Molitch-Hou

A Norwegian robotics firm called Kongsberg Ferrotech, which creates subsea robots for the oil and gas industry, is developing a form of underwater 3D printing for repairing pipelines below the sea. To develop the process, known as “Subsea Additive Manufacturing for Lifetime Extension”, the company is working with Equinor, SINTEF, and Gassco.

Kongsberg Ferrotech offers several robots that perform inspection, repair and maintenance (IRM) of subsea equipment. This includes a system called Nautilus, which remotely repairs pipelines using composite materials. Nautilus has passed deepwater testing in the Trondheim Fjord in Norway and the company plans to begin commercial operations in the Southeast Asian market in Q3 20201. Footage of how this process works can be seen in the video below: