Dr. Shaochen Chen

3D Printing News Alert(3D Printed implant to treat spinal cord injury)

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According to a Professor of Neuroscience and director of the Translational Neuroscience Institute at UC San Diego School of Medicine, “Axons are the long, threadlike extensions on nerve cells that reach out to connect to other cells.”
According to Co-senior author Shaochen Chen, Ph.D. Professor of nanoengineering and a faculty member in the Institute of Engineering in Medicine at UC San Diego, “Like a bridge, it aligns regenerating axons from one end of the spinal cord injury to the other. Axons can diffuse and regrow in any direction, but the scaffold keeps axons in order, guiding them in the right direction to complete the spinal cord connection”.
According to co-first author Wei Zhu, Ph.D., nanoengineering postdoctoral fellow, “This shows the flexibility of our 3D printing technology. Vascularization is one of the main obstacles in engineering tissue implants that can last in the body for a long time.”

3D Printed Implant Promotes Nerve Cell Growth to Treat Spinal Cord Injury

 

What challenges do you think need to be overcome in order to make 3D-printed spinal implants more widely available?

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3D Printing Blood Vessel Networks

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3-D printers can assemble raw materials into very complex products. Researchers had previously fabricated a single blood vessel, which amounted to no more than a long and slender tube. The next hurdle is to create complex, branching networks of blood vessels.

A team of engineers led by Dr. Shaochen Chen of the University of California, San Diego, aimed to improve on current 3-D printers to better engineer complex tissues like blood vessel networks. Their research was supported by NIH’s National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB). Results were published online in advance of the April 2017 issue of Biomaterials.

“Almost all tissues and organs need blood vessels to survive and work properly. This is a big bottleneck in making organ transplants, which are in high demand but in short supply,” says Chen. “3-D bioprinting organs can help bridge this gap, and our lab has taken a big step toward that goal.”

The results show that a complex tissue resembling blood vessels can be formed using a 3-D printer. The ultimate challenge for this research team is to engineer heart tissue with a complex network of blood vessels. Such tissues might be used to replace damaged heart muscle or for drug testing. :)

https://ucsd.edu.

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