Galway researchers bioprint tissue cells that change shape

22 Jan 2025

Ankita Pramanick. Image: Aengus McMahon.

According to the researchers, this breakthrough brings us a step closer to generating functional bioprinted organs.

Scientists at the University of Galway have developed a new way of 4D bioprinting tissue cells that can change shape, bringing us a step closer to manufacturing organs for humans.

The researchers, led by a team at the university’s School of Engineering and the Cúram Research Ireland Centre for Medical Devices, found a way to use a hydrogel platform to bioprint tissues that change shape through cell-generated forces, similar to biological tissues when organs naturally develop.

Bioprinting technology uses specialised ‘bioink’ materials that contain living cells and offer the possibility of creating lab-grown organs that closely resemble the structure of their human equivalent. However, the technology has ways to go before it can be fully functional.

For example, while a bioprinted heart’s tissues contract, their contractions are much weaker than that of a healthy human adult, and according to the researchers, this is because traditional bioprinting methods aim to directly recreate the final anatomical shape of an organ, often overlooking the importance of dynamic shape-changing behaviours during the organ’s development. The researchers say these behaviours are essential for sculpting cell development.

Targeting this, the team behind the research – which was published in the Advanced Functional Materials journal last year – said that their technique incorporates the cells’ shape-changing behaviour.

Ankita Pramanick, the lead author of the study and a Cúram PhD candidate at the university, said: “Our work introduces a novel platform, using embedded bioprinting to bioprint tissues that undergo programmable and predictable 4D shape-morphing driven by cell-generated forces.

“Using this new process, we found that shape-morphing improved the structural and functional maturity of bioprinted heart tissues.”

Their research, which focuses on heart tissues, showed that cell-generated forces could guide the shape-morphing of bioprinted tissues, which the scientists can control by modifying factors including the print geometry and the bioink’s stiffness. Moreover, the team also developed a computational model that could predict tissue shape-morphing behaviour.

“Our research shows that by allowing bioprinted heart tissues to undergo shape-morphing, they start to beat stronger and faster,” said Dr Andrew Daly, an associate professor in biomedical engineering, a Cúram-funded investigator and the principal investigator on the project.

“The limited maturity of bioprinted tissues has been a major challenge in the field, so this was an exciting result for us. This allows us to create more advanced bioprinted heart tissue, with the ability to mature in a laboratory setting, better replicating adult human heart structure.

“We are excited to build on this shape-morphing approach in our ongoing European Research Council project, which is focused on developmentally-inspired bioprinting.”

However, we are still a long way from bioprinting functional tissues that could be implanted in humans, said Daly.

Earlier last year, Dr Josephine Wu, a researcher at Trinity College Dublin’s School of Engineering, secured an €800,000 Wellcome Early Career Award for her project Opto-BioPrinting, with which she aims to create a new platform for spatiotemporally guided tissue engineering. Her approach involves using light to make cells produce specific proteins where they are needed on demand.

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Suhasini Srinivasaragavan is a sci-tech reporter for Silicon Republic

editorial@siliconrepublic.com