Biodiscoveries: Allevi is Pushing the Power of Cells at the Heart of Bioprinting http://bit.ly/2UWNOp1 Although it might take years before 3D bioprinting takes center stage in medicine everywhere, the companies behind the technology are certainly giving it the momentum it needs, partnering with university labs and research facilities at some of the biggest firms on the globe. One of the big players trying to break the boundaries of bioengineering is Allevi, leading the way with their easy-to-use and cost-efficient bioprinters and one-of-a-kind software. But it’s not just about the mechanics of bioprinting for Ricky Solorzano, founder and CEO of Allevi: it’s all about the cells.
The goal at Allevi is to make “really awesome platforms”, and so they do a lot of work to make the experience of designing, executing and printing biomaterials and bioinks as easy and as powerful as possible.
According to Solorzano, an engineer with years of lab experience at the University of Pennsylvania, the best applications for this technology “probably lie in both the bone and cancer space,” although nothing has materialized just yet, while the money to be made today is in tissue modelling for drug screening. With a family of printers ranging from $10,000 to $100,000, the company, founded four years ago, is certainly represented in the competitive bioprinting market. What differentiates the more pricey printers is the number of heads, which correlates to the complexity of the tissue that can be created, including the number of cell types researchers can design with it and how fast they can create them. Allevi’s line of bioprinters serves the research community at a variety of universities as well as pharmaceutical companies, including Johnson & Johnson, Abbvie, GSK, MIT, Stanford and the University of Sheffield. The Philadelphia-based firm is looking forth into 3D bioprinting custom replacement valves from your own heart cells to eventually reduce the rate of failure and rejection in heart transplants. Scientists at George Washington University have been using the printer to bioprint heart tissue. While a team at UC San Diego has bioprinted a section of spinal cord that can be custom-fit into a patient’s injury, and researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital & The University of Nebraska Lincoln collaborated using an Allevi 2 bioprinter to find a solution to better surgically connect blood vessels. In 2017, Northwestern University developed a form of 3D printed hyperelastic bone that not only encourages bone regrowth within the body, but actually grows with it.
More recently, Allevi has been focusing on building software that makes printing very easy for its users. The real cost in 3D printing biological models is not just materials or printers, but also the software used to translate the scans into files for the printer. There is a lot of complexity that goes into 3D bioprinting, like the design, the materials selected, the temperature needed or even the pressure, are all variables that the researcher needs to think about. But Solorzano and Allevi take that complexity and mask it behind simplicity by adding standardization to its software.
Standardization might just be what bioprinting is looking for, according to Solorzano.
Training middle school and high school students in bioprinting technology is a good way to pave the way into the future, which is why the company created the Allevi Academy, a curriculum for high schools interested in teaching bioprinting to students, which begins with a crash course in bioinks and different strategies for bioprinting, like making small blood vessels in a gel. Since 2018, Allevi has been working with California-based 3D printing and space technology firm Made in Space, which is responsible for introducing 3D printing to the International Space Station (ISS) four years ago, to develop the Allevi ZeroG – the first 3D bioprinter in space. This is a project that Solorzano finds very exiting, especially because it is a gateway to understanding how microgravity has an effect on biology and the different tissues that make up the human body. Allevi developed a compatible extruder, fittingly called the ZeroG bio-extruder, that is able to be outfitted onto Made In Space’s Additive Manufacturing Facility currently on board the ISS. This new bio-extruder will make it possible for scientists using the Allevi 3D bioprinting platform to run experiments in space, and back home on Earth, at the same time, in order to observe and study any biological differences that happen when 3D printing with gravity and without it.
Having this technology paves the way into a transformative future where cells become the protagonists, not only on Earth, but also in space. It is through this living, smart organisms that bioprinting is allowing researchers to create functional tissues out of human cells, and predicting how they will behave in a lab, this is without a doubt the future of medicine, and Allevi is creating the means to make it possible. Making bioprinting simpler will provide new avenues that were not thought of before where 3D printing can become a very unique and valuable tool that could in the future save lives. Printing via 3DPrint.com | The Voice of 3D Printing / Additive Manufacturing https://3dprint.com April 24, 2019 at 06:18AM
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