Manufacturing living things

Industrial engineers have an integral role to develop and refine the new fabrication processes necessary to bring organ printing closer to reality. The most critical challenge, of course, is to ensure that the printed structure functions correctly. Another challenge is spatially organizing multiple cell types to form the complex architecture of an organ. Success in organ printing highly depends on the advancements in stem cell technology. One of the most promising research activities is bioprinting a glucose-sensitive pancreatic organ that can be grown in a lab and transplanted anywhere inside the body to regulate the glucose level of blood. The team's approach to achieving this goal is to exploit stem-cell-derived insulin- producing cells and assemble them into a 3-D artificial organ using a new multiple-arm robotic-assisted bioprinting platform. The team currently is working on an in-house multiple-arm robot to, simultaneously and independently, deposit vessel-like microfluidic channels and tissue spheroids or beads that encapsulate thousands of living cells.