Hasta La Ideas

Bart Veldhuizen, community manager at online 3D-printing service Shapeways, takes Dezeen on an exclusive behind-the-scenes tour of the company’s Eindhoven print facility for the final instalment in our series of movies about additive manufacturing.

Shapeways is a website where customers can upload a 3D model and get it printed out and shipped to their front door. It also provides an online marketplace where designers can sell their 3D-printed designs, which Shapeways prints out and delivers to order.

Veldhuizen gave us a tour of the company’s European headquarters in Eindhoven as part of our research for Print Shift, the magazine about 3D printing we launched earlier this year.

“Shapeways is the world’s leading 3D printing marketplace and community,” he says in the movie. “You can design anything, have it 3D-printed, share it, sell it, make it your business. We have 250,000 community members right now who are designing their own work and who are selling and buying on the website.”

One of the most popular products available on the website is a fully working model of a walking sculpture created by artist Theo Jansen, Veldhuizen says. Called Strandbeest, the intricate toy is printed in one go, without any assembly required. An optional propellor can also be printed separately and added to the model to make it wind-powered.

“It contains 75 moving parts and it will actually walk,” says Veldhuizen. “It’s wind-powered, you blow on the propeller and off it goes.”

Starting the tour, Veldhuizen takes us to a computer room, where incoming 3D files are processed and assessed.

“After you place an order, we need to check if a part is actually printable or not,” Veldhuizen explains. “That can mean several things. Will it survive the printing process? Will it survive shipping? All kinds of factors like that.”

Shapeways do not print out objects one at a time, as you might using a desktop 3D printer. Rather, multiple 3D objects are printed together in large trays.

“We try to plan our printers as efficiently as possible,” says Veldhuizen. “Sometimes we fit in 300-400 parts in one printer. The more we can fit in, the more efficiently we can produce, of course.”

Veldhuizen then takes us to one of the company’s printing rooms, where laser sintering machines print models out of white nylon powder.

“We deposit a fine layer of powder on the print bed, a laser sinters one cross-section at a time and then the process repeats,” explains Veldhuizen. “After the printing is done, we unpack the tray. We take the entire printed tray, we push it out of the box and we take it apart by hand.”

He continues: “Once the printer starts, it prints about one centimetre an hour. A medium-sized tray can take 24-36 hours to print. After that it’s still quite hot and will take the same amount of time to cool down. Only after that we can start unpacking it.”

For an extra cost, Shapeways can also polish and dye the 3D-printed models.

“For most of the materials that we use, we look to see how we can make it more interesting for designers or consumers,” says Veldhuizen. “In the case of nylon prints, we found that polishing it after printing will give a much more smooth feeling, much closer to injection-moulded plastic.”

Next, Veldhuizen takes us to a different print room, which produces what Shapeways calls “frosted ultra-detail” models. Here, multi-jet modelling machines print out highly detailed models by depositing fine layers of plastic resin, which are cured with a UV light.

“Ultra detail is a material that’s very highly detailed; we can print walls up to 0.1 millimetres thick,” says Veldhuizen. “It’s not powder-based, it’s a photo-acrylic and then we use a UV light to cure it. This is mainly used by designers who want to create miniature trains or miniature game models.”

We finish the tour at Shapeways’ distribution centre, where the 3D-printed models are given a final quality control inspection before being shipped out to customers.

“After ordering, it takes between 2-3 weeks for an order to arrive at your home,” says Veldhuizen. “After printing, we check every part to make sure it’s printed to the right quality standards and if it passes it gets shipped out.”

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In our second movie focussing on the cutting-edge world of 3D printing, Freedom of Creation co-founder Janne Kyttanen claims it was his passion for the technology rather than his business acumen that enabled him to make a commercial success out of designing and selling 3D-printed products.

When we visited Kyttanen as part of our research for Print Shift, the one-off magazine about 3D printing that we launched earlier this year, he showed us a range of different 3D-printed products he has designed over the years, including the very first lampshade he printed in 2000.

“This was the first thing I ever made and it cost me €5,000 at the time,” Kyttanen reveals in the movie. “It made no commercial sense whatsoever.”

However, over the subsequent years Kyttanen would team up with Belgian 3D printing company Materialise to create a range of 3D-printed lamps, one of the first collections in which 3D printing was used to created finished products rather than prototypes.

“That whole experiment led to an entire collection of lights,” says Kyttanen. “We started a company together called Materialise.MGX and commercially that’s been very successful.”

Over the years, some of Kyttanen’s 3D-printed products have been profitable, such as his range of customisable iPhone cases for accessories company Freshfiber, and others have not. Kyttanen says that the products he put his passion into have tended to be more successful than those he designed to make a profit.

“I made a light, which is called the 1597”, he says. “It took me about 6 months to make it and I put an enormous amount of passion into it, but the final pieces were very expensive. We sold quite a lot of them and I was very happy with it. But I thought I could make it smaller, more consumer-friendly and try to maximise the profit. And then we hardly sold any.”

“One I wanted to make money out of and the other was the one I put my passion into, which was ten times more expensive, but that one sold well and the other one didn’t.”

Likewise, Kyttanen says that the success of his company Freedom of Creation, which was bought by American 3D-printing giant 3D systems in 2011, is down to his passion rather than his shrewdness as a businessman.

“I started a company with a completely pointless, bogus business plan,” he says. “I went to a lot of banks and I tried to get finance for it and I told them: ‘One day the world will be in a way that I can put my entire company’s worth in this USB stick.’ That was probably 10 years ago.”

“Everybody said: ‘No, that’s not going to happen, we’re not going to give you any finance because your business plan is completely bogus.’ Well, ten years later, I sell my company with exactly that same idea.”

Kyttanen concludes: “So, if I am able to inspire any young artists out there, don’t listen to anybody. Just follow your passion and it will find its own way.”

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Forward-thinking 
designers are using 3D printing to blow architecture wide open, as Dezeen’s editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs reports in this extract from Print Shift, our one-off publication dedicated to the developing technology.

The race to build the first 3D-printed house has begun. Teams of architects in London and Amsterdam are competing to produce the first habitable printed structure, using technology that could transform the way buildings are made. Though they all have the same objective, the teams are investigating very different materials and fabrication methods.

The starting pistol was fired by Dutch studio Universe Architecture, who, in January of this year, unveiled designs for a looping two-storey house that resembles a Möbius strip and will be printed on site, in concrete.

Shortly after, UK architects Softkill Design announced plans for Protohouse 2.0, a single-storey dwelling with a fibrous structure resembling bone growth. It will be made of plastic and printed in a factory, in sections that are then snapped together on site.

Then DUS Architects, also based in Amsterdam, went public with a project to print, room by room, a canal house in the city, using a homemade portable printer located inside an upended shipping container. In addition, a research team at MIT in the US is working on plans to print a small pavilion fashioned by a robotic arm imitating the manner in which a silkworm builds its cocoon.

All these approaches are completely untried at this scale. And there’s a certain amount of scepticism regarding the viability of scaling up a technology that, until now, has only been used to make relatively small objects – objects that do not demand the structural or environmental performance of a house. But architects working in this area are convinced it won’t be long before additive manufacturing transforms their discipline.

“When we started our research, we were dealing in science fiction,” says Gilles Retsin of Softkill Design. “Everyone on the architecture scene was saying, ‘It’s only going to be possible in 50 or 60 years.’ But when we were sitting at the table in front of one of these 3D-printing companies, these guys were like, ‘Yeah, no problem – let’s start up the research, let’s push it.’ So it’s not actually that far off any more.”

Neri Oxman, architect and founder of the Mediated Matter group at the MIT Media Lab, argues that digital fabrication is ushering in a third era of construction technology. “Prior to the industrial revolution, hand-production methods were abundant,” she says. “Craft defined everything. The craftsman had an almost phenomenological knowledge of materials and intuited how to vary their properties according to their structural and environmental characteristics.”

But the coming of the industrial revolution saw the triumph of the machine over the hand. “The machine was used to standardise everything. And the things we built – our products, our buildings – were defined by these industrial standards.”

Now, however, digital technologies such as additive manufacturing allow craft and industry to merge. “Craft meets the machine in rapid fabrication,” says Oxman. “We can generate craft with the help of technology.”

The question is, which technologies are best suited to architecture? The results of the above architectural experiments will go some way towards answering that.

Universe Architecture is collaborating on its Landscape House with Italian robotics engineer Enrico Dini, inventor of an extremely large-format 3D printer that uses sand and a chemical binding agent to create a stone-like material. Dini’s machine, called D-Shape, is the largest 3D printer in the world. Located in a warehouse near Pisa, it looks like a stage-lighting rig and works like a laser-sintering machine, but with sand instead of nylon powder, and chemicals instead of a laser.

A moving horizontal gantry first deposits a 5mm substrate layer of sand mixed with magnesium oxide, then, via a row of nozzles, squirts chlorine onto the areas of sand that are to become solid. This resulting chemical reaction creates synthetic sandstone.

The gantry is then raised, another layer of sand is added and the process is repeated. When the D-Shape has completed its printing, the surplus sand is carefully removed to reveal the solid object underneath.

D-Shape prints at a rate of 5cm per hour over a 30-square-metre area, to a depth of up to two metres. Working flat-out, it can produce 30 cubic metres of building structure per week. Dini is a pioneer in the field and the only person to have already printed prototype structures at an architectural scale. In 2009 he worked with architect Andrea Morgante to print a three-metre-high pavilion resembling a giant egg with large holes in its surface. Fabricated in sections and then assembled, it was intended as a scale model of a 10-metre structure that was never built; nonetheless, it can stake a claim to being the first-ever printed architectural structure.

Dini worked with designer Marco Ferreri in 2010 to create the first dwelling to be printed in one piece. The resulting “house” – a one-room structure resembling a mountain hut – was printed for an exhibition at the Triennale in Milan. The crude building had a doorway and two square windows; its interior featured a work surface, sink and platform bed.

“It’s a very historical piece,” says Dini. “It was the first attempt to print a building.” Unfortunately, the brittle synthetic stone cracked during transportation, leading Dini to decide that fabricating buildings by section was a more viable use for his technology.

Printing buildings in one go will be possible in the future, says Dini, “but probably not with my technology.” Instead, he now sees a role for D-Shape in printing building elements like large façade panels, large diameter columns and double-curvature components.

Machines such as D-Shape could eventually be adapted to work on the move, Dini adds, allowing them to print on an urban scale. “We might print not only buildings, but entire urban sections,” he says.

For Universe Architecture’s Landscape House, Dini has devised a system that will see two D-Shape printers working side by side inside temporary structures close to the site. The D-Shapes will print a kit of parts that will be assembled to form the looping structure. Each part will be hollow; the superstructure will be filled with fibre-reinforced concrete to give it structural integrity.

“Before our Landscape House design, you could easily use the printer to print vertical columns,” says Janjaap Ruijssenaars of Universe Architecture, “but it was not possible to print something that has a horizontal connection, like a beam. By putting reinforced concrete within a hollow structure, you can have a vertical load on top of a horizontal structure. And that opens the door for all types of designs. It was Enrico Dini’s idea.”

Because of the fragility of the individual parts, they’ll have to be printed with support structures to prevent them from breaking while they’re manoeuvred into position; these will be removed after the concrete filling has been poured in. The entire process will take up to a year and cost around €5 million. Universe Architecture doesn’t yet have a client willing to put up that kind of money.

Some purists argue that this convoluted process is not “true” 3D-printing. “We actually don’t consider that a 3D-printed building,” says Softkill Design’s Gilles Retsin, “because they’re 3D-printing formwork, then pouring concrete into the form. So it’s not that the actual building is 3D-printed.”

For its Protohouse 2.0, Softkill Design plans to print the entire building using industrial laser-sintering machines normally used to make prototypes for the automobile industry.

“The existing research always focuses on transporting a 3D printer to the site because they’re using sand or concrete,” says Retsin. “We’re deliberately working in a factory and using laser-sintered bioplastic [plastics derived from biomass rather than hydrocarbons].”

The design itself also bucks convention: instead of columns and floorplates, it has a fibrous structure akin to the trabecular composition of bone. Unlike sand-based structures, which require thick sections to maintain structural integrity, Retsin says these fibres can be as thin as 0.7mm.

This opens up all sorts of new aesthetic possibilities. Traditional steel or concrete structures have a high level of redundancy – material that doesn’t need to be there, but which is too difficult or expensive to remove. But 3D printing allows material to be placed only where it is required. “We created an algorithm that mimics bone growth, so that we’re depositing material only where it’s necessary and most structurally efficient,” says Softkill Design’s Aaron Silver. “It’s not a purely structural object; we’ve also tried to ‘design’ with it, to create our own forms.”

The single-storey house has a porous exoskeleton rather than a solid envelope. Weatherproofing would be applied inside, lining the cave-like living spaces. Voids would be glazed in the traditional manner.

The building will have a footprint of around 8 by 5 metres and will be laser-sintered in a factory, in pieces. These pieces, each up to 2.5 metres, will be transported by van to the site (although, like Universe Architecture, Softkill Design doesn’t have a specific site or client yet) and joined simply by pushing together the fibrous strands “like Velcro”. Softkill Design believes the pieces could all be printed in three weeks and assembled on site in a single day.

“The big difference between 3D printing and manufacturing on site is that you’re almost entirely skipping the fabrication part,” says Retsin. There are huge potential time, labour and transportation savings to be made, compared to traditional construction methods – however, the cost of 3D-printed materials is still far higher than regular bricks and blocks.

“The price of 3D printing is still a big problem for large volumes,” says Retsin. “You pay for the amount of material used rather than the volume. So we’ve developed a method that can generate a large volume with extremely thin and porous structures. It’s only now with 3D printing that you can achieve a strong, fibrous structure using less material than a normal structure. That makes it cheaper.”

For its canal house project, DUS Architects is using lower technology: a scaled-up Ultimaker desktop machine that it calls the KamerMaker (“room maker”) that can print components up to 3.5 metres high. Working initially in polypropylene, the architects hope to experiment with recycled plastics and bioplastics further into the build.

The project is not about exploring new architectural possibilities but rather generating discussion about the future of design and construction. Starting on site this summer, DUS intends to figure out the construction methodology as it goes along and hold workshops and open days in the structure as it is built. “3D printing is not going to replace brick and concrete buildings. I think it’s more going to be the case that we’ll start printing brick and concrete,” says architect Hedwig Heinsman of DUS. “This is something to kick-start a debate about where architects will be in the future.”

Over in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the Mediated Matter group at MIT is researching a head-spinning array of innovative design and construction processes that integrate, as their website states, “computational form-finding strategies with biologically inspired fabrication”. Many of these involve looking at ways of developing 3D-printing technologies for architectural applications.

“The 3D-printing technology has been developing at a very rapid pace,” says Mediated Matter founder Neri Oxman, “but there are still many limitations,” such as the range of materials you can use, the maximum size you can print at and the speed of the process.

Oxman and her team are researching ways of getting around such drawbacks, for example experimenting with printers that can produce “functionally graded” materials that exhibit a range of different properties.

Existing 3D printers are only able to produce homogeneous materials that have the same properties throughout. But graded materials would be useful for printing architectural elements – such as beams or façades that mimic bone, which is hard on the outside but spongy on the inside. Or for printing human skin, which has differently sized pores on different parts of the body, allowing it to act as a filter on the face and a protective barrier on the back.

Oxman has developed a process to assign different materials or properties to individual voxels (volumetric pixels) produced on existing printers, creating simple graded materials. But gradients are hard to produce with the current generation of 3D printers, which rely on armatures or gantries that can only move on three axes – back and forward, side to side, and up and down – and which must lay down material in layers, one atop the other. They also require complex support structures to be printed at the same time to prevent the printed objects collapsing under their own weight.

“In traditional 3D printing, the gantry size poses an obvious limitation for the designer who wishes to print in larger scales and achieve structural and material complexity,” explains Oxman. She and her team are investigating ways of printing with additional axes of movement, by replacing the gantry with a six-axis robotic arm. “Once we place a 3D-printing head on a robotic arm, we free up these limitations almost instantly,” she says. This is because it allows “free-form” printing at a larger scale and without the need for support structures.

Oxman and her team have been looking to the natural world for inspiration, studying the way in which silkworms build their cocoons. Silkworms “print” their pupal casings by moving their heads in a figure-of-eight pattern, depositing silk fibre and sericin matrix around themselves as they go. They’re able to vary the gradient of the printed material, making the cocoon soft on the inside and hard on the outside. As well as the silk fibre – which can be up to a kilometre in length – the pupae also excretes sericin, a sticky gum that bonds the fibres together to form the cocoon. Essentially, the silkworm is acting as a multi-axis 3D multi-material printer.

“We attached tiny magnets to a silkworm’s head,” says Oxman, “and we motion-tracked its movement as it built its cocoon. We then translated the data to a 3D printer connected to a robotic arm, which would allow us to examine the biological structure in a larger scale.”

Oxman’s team will perform its first large-scale experiment using this research in April, when it aims to print a pavilion-like structure, measuring 3.6 by 3.6 metres, using a robot programmed to act like a silkworm.

Robotic arms can be used to print in traditional materials, such as plastic, concrete or composites, or employed to weave or knit three-dimensional fibre structures. Researchers are also exploring how the high-performance fibres excreted by silkworms and spiders could be produced artificially, and Oxman’s team will print the pavilion’s structure using natural silk.

In the future, buildings may be constructed by swarms of tiny robots that use a combination of printing and weaving techniques, Oxman says. “I would argue that 3D printing is more than anything an approach for organising material,” she says, using the terms “4D printing”, “swarm construction” and “CNC weaving” to describe the future of architectural technology. “Today’s material limitations can be overcome by printing with responsive materials,” she says. “Gantry limitations can be overcome by printing with multiple interactive robot-printers. And process limitations can be overcome by moving from layering to weaving in 3D space, using a robotic arm.”

According to this vision, the construction site of the future will owe more to tiny creatures like silkworms than to ever-larger 3D printers of the type we use today. “Transcending the scale limitation by using larger gantries can only offer so much,” says Oxman. “But if we consider swarm construction, we are truly pushing building technology into the 21st century.”

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In this article from Print Shift, our one-off magazine about additive manufacturing, Dezeen’s Ben Hobson asks how soon we could be tucking into 3D-printed steaks.

The concept of 3D-printed food is hard to swallow, but technology that could revolutionise the way we cook is hotting up.

In 2009, Philips Design presented a sci-fi vision of the future with a conceptual food printer that could produce a perfectly balanced meal at the touch of a few buttons. Part of a research project called Food Probe, which looked at how we might source and eat food in 15 to 20 years’ time, the imagined machine would allow our future selves to print out our ideal combinations of flavours and nutrients in an unlimited range of forms.

It sounded too Star Trek to be true (as Dezeen readers were quick to point out when we originally ran the story). But with 3D-printing technologies advancing as rapidly as they are, the idea may not be as far off as it once seemed.

Philips itself is not developing a 3D food printer, but companies around the world are starting to take the concept seriously. Janne Kyttanen has been at the forefront of 3D-printing technology for many years and he believes food is next on the list to be revolutionised by 3D printing. “We have many different avenues in which 3D printing technology is moving. We’ve explored all different kinds of products and different materials,” he says. “Food is the next frontier.”

Kyttanen has already 3D-printed an experimental hamburger and a breakfast cereal in novelty shapes, including his own head, but these are merely conceptual models of plastic and plaster. “I wanted to pinch people a little bit. I printed burgers just to create an iconic image and make people realise that one day we will be able to 3D-print a hamburger.”

But while the 3D-printed burger of the future is some way off, the transition from printing with plastics to printing with food has already begun. In 2011 Luis Fraguada, research director at architecture studio Built By Associative Data, was using a desktop 3D printer to produce prototypes of customised crockery when he was approached by a young chef called Paco Morales, who asked him a question: if you can print out a plate, could you also print out a piece of food onto that plate?

Fraguada and Morales, together with architects Deniz Manisali, José Ramón Tramoyeres and Andrés Arias Madrid – who collectively make up the research group Robots In Gastronomy – have been working on a 3D food printer ever since.

Their machine uses an adapted version of the same fused deposition modelling technology that’s commonly used to print plastics: food is extruded through a nozzle and built up in layers to the specified design. “We started with a MakerBot,” Fraguada explains. “We put in our own print head to let us print out viscose food materials.”

The nature of the technology means the printer is limited to creating customised 3D shapes out of soft or puréed foodstuffs such as mascarpone, guacamole or chocolate spread; Fraguada soon discovered that “Nutella is the perfect material for printing”. But he believes the potential for the technology extends far beyond simple novelty value.

“For me, it’s interesting to think about the possibilities for somebody with specific dietary requirements – someone who needs to precisely measure out certain types of food, for example. Nutrition is the root of many of our medical problems, globally. My hope is that at some point we will have more control over the elements that we put into our bodies.”

It’s not just designers who are exploring the possibilities of 3D-printed food. Scientists at Cornell University’s Creative Machines Lab in Ithaca, New York, have developed an open-source desktop 3D printer called Fab@Home, which, using a similar extrusion-based technology, can print with plastic as well as cake mixture, icing and peanut butter.

They have also experimented with meat, but that proved to be much trickier. “We know from the flavouring industry that we can make anything taste like anything, and we know from the colouring industry that we can make anything look like anything,” Cornell scientist Jeffrey Lipton says. “But if food doesn’t have the right feel to it, if it feels too processed, people have a gut reaction against it.”

Nobody wants to eat a gloopy steak, basically. But Lipton has enjoyed some success with using meat as a print material. In 2010 he was able to print various types of puréed meat into shapes that were then deep-fried, including a scallop printed into the shape of a space shuttle, which was, Lipton assures, “absolutely delicious”. The key was to combine the puréed meat with an enzyme called transglutaminase, which helps the proteins reconnect and the meat to regain its texture. Lipton believes that with the necessary scientific research, we will one day be able to take the next step and print foodstuffs like meat “from the ground up”.

In fact, the research is already well underway. American company Modern Meadow 
was set up in 2012 with the specific goal to develop in vitro meat and leather products for which no animal has to die. The idea is to use the same bioprinting technology that is being developed in the medical industry to grow transplantable human tissue, but to produce meat for human consumption instead.

Modern Meadow is still a development-stage company, and it has put no time frame on when the meat it hopes to produce will be available to buy. But it has the money behind it to succeed; PayPal co-founder and billionaire Peter Thiel is an investor.

There are others willing to put money behind 3D-printed food. Kjeld van Bommel is a research scientist at Dutch contract research organisation TNO, which works with some of the world’s biggest food companies, and he says they are interested. “We’re actually doing projects with some international companies, big food companies, that see a future for 3D-printed food,” he says.

Unfortunately these projects are all top secret. But there is one project van Bommel is free to discuss. TNO is helping to develop a food printer as part of an EU-backed project aiming to improve the lives of people suffering from a condition called dysphagia, which causes chewing and swallowing problems. By removing the usual pleasures of eating, the condition often leads to malnutrition.

The machine TNO is developing will combine puréed foodstuffs with a special gelatine binding agent, and print them out in 3D shapes that are soft enough to be eaten. “We’re going to print a piece of chicken and we’re going to print a potato,” van Bommel explains. “People will get a plate of food in front of them that they can eat with a knife and fork, rather than having a milkshake three times a day. It’s already been shown that people eat better when they do that.”

The printer will work much like a 2D inkjet, printing out food in droplets and building up a 3D structure layer by layer. Crucially, just like the food printer conceived by Philips Design, its output will be completely customisable. “The food will be personalised,” van Bommel enthuses. “The number of calories will be personalised. Nutrients like calcium or omega-3 fatty acids will be personalised as well. Even the softness or hardness of the food will be tuned to the needs of the client. Everyone will get their own personalised plate of food in front of them.”

This printer is not a far-off fantasy. The project started in 2012, and if it stays on schedule, they’ll have a working prototype within three years. Van Bommel believes it will only take another couple of years after that before a commercial product is available.

Of course, while the softness of the food it will produce has obvious benefits for those suffering from swallowing disorders, most people would not want to eat it.

Nevertheless, as the technology continues to advance, and with companies with the 
necessary financial muscle starting to get behind 3D-printed food, a food printer of the kind Philips Design imagined seems a significant step closer to becoming reality.

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3D-print a hamburger” appeared first on Dezeen.

Michael Renard, executive vice president of bioprinting company Organovo, explains how 3D printing could one day be used to produce replacement tissue, vessels and organs in this interview conducted for our print-on-demand magazine Print Shift (+ transcript).

In the interview Renard describes how Organovo is applying 3D printing to cell biology and tissue engineering.

“We’re working with small pieces of tissue at the moment – a small piece of blood vessel or liver,” he says. “Once you have the cells ready, we can print something in a few hours.”

He also discusses how the technology can be used for experimental drug testing: “Being able to provide functional living human tissues will provide drug-discovery scientists with entirely new means to test drug candidates.”

Although supplemental tissues such as patches to assist heart conditions may reach the clinic soon, he thinks that use of “more advanced replacement tissues will most likely be in 20 years or more.”

The interview forms part of a feature on the way 3D printing is transforming the healthcare industry in Print Shift, our one-off, print-on-demand magazine about this emerging technology.

The magazine was created by the Dezeen editorial team and produced with print-on-demand publisher Blurb. For more information about Print Shift and to see additional content, visit www.dezeen.com/printshift.

Top image: cross-section of bioprinted human liver tissue.

Here’s an edited transcript of the interview, conducted by Claire Barrett:

Claire Barrett: Tell me how Organovo’s 3D printing research began?

Michael Renard: The concept for printing tissues came out of Professor Gabor Forgac’s research at the University of Missouri, enabled through a $5 million grant from the National Science Foundation. That work was about using living cells and depositing cells in an architecture that could create tissue.

It led to the creation of Organovo as a company, which acquired that intellectual property exclusively. Gabor worked mostly with non-human cell sources to build structures, layer by layer. Through that science we arrived where we are today.

Claire Barrett: Is it possible to print an organ?

Michael Renard: Bioprinting should be thought of as the first step in building fully functional tissue. The printing starts a process to create a continuous piece of tissue. That early tissue construct is moved to a bioreactor where it grows and differentiates into its final form. We’re the only company doing it. Our approach is consistent with other forms 3D printing because it’s an additive process, but what is unique to Organovo is our application of the process in the field of cell biology and tissue engineering.

Claire Barrett: How does it work?

Michael Renard: Tissues are built layer by layer, using a combination of hydrogel and cell aggregates deposited in specific spatial arrangements that are programmed into the bioprinter. A wide variety of shapes and orientations can be created using the combination of these materials.

When you deposit cells they have to be the right cells and in the right biological state; the hydrogel holds them in the right place. Then the cells fuse, form junctions, and the hydrogel can be removed to yield a tangible piece of material made up entirely of human cells.

Claire Barrett: How long does it take?

Michael Renard: It all depends what you’re trying to grow. We’re working with small pieces of tissue at the moment – a small piece of blood vessel or liver, for example, so our time from printing to maturity of the tissue can be quite quick. Once you have the cells ready, we can print something in a few hours. It will then take a few days for it to fuse and become anatomically correct, and begin to exhibit expected metabolic properties.

It is unknown how long it will take to build larger, organ-sized tissues. We are researching ways to grow a vascular system as part of the tissue design; that is needed to feed tissue grown on a large scale, without which cell death will occur as tissues expand in size.

Claire Barrett: Are certain tissues easier to grow?

Michael Renard: Virtually all tissues have a specific design and repeating patterns. Each tissue has a consistent set of characteristics, such as certain cell types that create capillary systems, nerves and collagens. These patterns and symmetry can help as the scientific advances and discoveries with one tissue will better inform how to approach the creation of subsequent tissues.

Claire Barrett: How is it used in drug discovery and what are the benefits?

Michael Renard: Being able to provide functional living human tissues will provide drug-discovery scientists with entirely new means to test drug candidates and study their effects in an environment most like that of the drug administered in the human body. This can both improve the safety of potential drugs and help determine whether a drug should be taken forward in very expensive human clinical trials. The end result can be a significant improvement in the efficiency of safety and efficacy testing.

Further to that, diseased tissue models can be built, giving the scientist a completely new approach for understanding disease and disease progression, with the opportunity to find new targets for building drugs with new mechanisms of action.

Claire Barrett: Is the public worried about the ethics of growing organs in a lab?

Michael Renard: People with chronic or degenerative conditions often live with the constant need for medical and assisted-living care. We can keep people alive, but at a cost to the healthcare system and at a reduced quality of life for the patient. What if we could reverse that process, or replace an organ? That’s what the focus is. There is public interest. People are waiting for transplants, but transplant surgeons lack the tissues to help all those in need. Eighteen people die every day in the US waiting for a transplant.

Claire Barrett: What about tissue rejection? Could you take cells from a person in future and grow tissue for transplant and therefore avoid this issue?

Michael Renard: It has become possible to harvest cells from a person’s own body and use them as a source of therapy. Research over the last decade or so shows that many sources of stem cells can be isolated and these often can be a valuable source of potential therapy from the patient themselves. In concept, a tissue engineered from a person’s own DNA should yield a match, with a much-reduced chance of rejection.

Claire Barrett: How far away are you from creating tissue that can be used in operations?

Michael Renard: In the next 10 years it is possible that supplemental tissues, ones that aid in regeneration, will progress through design, clinical and regulatory testing, making it to the clinic as therapies. Examples may include nerve grafts, patches to assist a heart condition, blood vessel segments, or cartilage for a degenerating joint. But more advanced replacement tissues will most likely be in 20 years or more.

Claire Barrett: What needs to happen to enable the next stage of innovation to take place?

Michael Renard: Supplemental tissues need to be shown to be safe, clinically effective and cost-effective in terms of reducing the total cost of care. Also, the ability to grow larger tissues – solving the challenge of creating a vascular and capillary network as an inherent part of the engineering solution – is the critical next step to advance the science.

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are ten years away” appeared first on Dezeen.