Cotton candy inspires tech to produce organs
IANS | Feb 10, 2016, 01.13 AM IST
New York: Taking a cue from cotton candy machines, scientists have
developed a 3D artificial capillary system that can keep living cells
viable and functional for more than a week, thus paving the way for
making life-sized artificial livers, kidneys, bones and other essential
organs.
Leon Bellan, assistant professor of mechanical
engineering at Tennessee-based Vanderbilt University, has been tinkering
with cotton candy machines for years. His goal is to make fibre
networks that can be used as templates to produce the cell capillary
systems required to create full-scale artificial organs.
"Some people in the field think this approach is a little crazy but
now, we have shown we can use this simple technique to make microfluidic
networks that mimic the 3D capillary system in the human body in a
cell-friendly fashion," Bellan noted in a paper that appeared in the
Advanced Healthcare Materials journal.
Bellan is currently focusing on water-based gels called hydrogels, and
using them as scaffolds to support cells within 3D artificial organs.
To engineer tissues that have the thickness of real organs and keep
cells alive throughout the entire scaffold, the researchers must build
in a network of channels that allow fluids to flow through the system,
mimicking the natural capillary system. According to Bellan, his
cotton-candy spinning method can produce channels ranging from three to
55 microns, with a mean diameter of 35 microns.
So far, the other approaches have only managed to create networks with
microchannels larger than 100 microns, about ten times the size of
capillaries. "Our experiments show that after seven days, 90% of the
cells in a scaffold with perfused microchannels remained alive and
functional compared to only 60-70% in scaffolds that were not perfused
or did not have microchannels," Bellan wrote.
