Bioprinters too expensive? Try making your own

Every day, 20 people in the United States die because of a lack of donated organs. One up-and-coming solution to combat this deficit is bioprinted tissues and organs, which use 3D bioprinting techniques to create tissue structures out of cells and biomaterials.

The bioprinting market is rapidly growing and expected to revolutionize some medical treatments. However, its widespread use is often limited by the high cost of producing bioprinting instruments. As a result, some researchers have turned to making bioprinters from scratch.

“The DIY [do it yourself] community has historically been an important group pushing open science and science in resource-limited settings forward,” said Y. Shrike Zhang, one of the authors on a recent guide to DIY bioprinting by Garciamendez-Mijares et al. “Although its appearance in 3D bioprinting has been relatively recent, it has become an important aspect of the entire field.”

The guide summarizes the current commercially available systems and their DIY options, focusing on systems that are extrusion, vat polymerization and droplet-based. The review also covers recent advances made in the field, remaining challenges that exist between commercial and custom-made devices, and future developments of current limitations.

“The review can be used as a guide, both for people who have just entered the field and want to start building their first bioprinters, and those who have been in the field for a while, have not been building bioprinters before, but now are thinking to do so,” Zhang said.

Emerging bioprinting techniques with computer-aided engineering could greatly increase successful transplants. The authors believe that at the current pace of development, bioprinting can be a widespread method for tissue fabrication in ten years.

Source: “State-of-art affordable bioprinters: A guide for the DiY community,” by Carlos Ezio Garciamendez-Mijares, Prajwal Agrawal, Germán García Martínez, Ernesto Cervantes Juarez, and Yu Shrike Zhang, Applied Physics Reviews (2021). The article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0047818 .