A bioprinter? No, "bioruchka"!

"Bioruchka" will allow you to "draw" implants right during the operation

Alexander Berezin, Compulenta

A new technique that stimulates the regeneration of damaged tissues will simplify recovery after severe injuries.

Australian scientists led by Gordon G. Wallace from the University of Wollongong have created a BioPen device capable of delivering living cells and growth factors directly to the injury site. This accelerates the regeneration of bones and cartilage damaged as a result of injury.

In fact, a portable "biorhandle" will allow surgeons to create "custom" implants right during the operation,
on the patient's bones. (Here and below are the UOW photos.)

In fact, BioPen works like a 3D printer, only instead of ink/plastic, it uses living cells packed in a biopolymer, for example, such as alginate (algae extract), protected by a second outer layer of gel material that does not allow the mixture to dry.

Two gel layers make up the outer part of the tip of the "pen"; during the operation, they are squeezed onto the surface of the bone, which the surgeon "paints", filling the damaged part with this "paste".

An ultraviolet light source is integrated into BioPen, whose task is to irradiate the "paste" after its application. The material, while maintaining the necessary permeability, hardens at the same time, which protects the cells inside it from the pressure of surrounding tissues. Then, if it is necessary to obtain even greater thickness, the procedure is repeated, creating a second and subsequent layers.

After the cells are delivered to their destination, they will begin to divide, and then differentiate into nerve, muscle and bone cells; when the desired number is reached, cell communities with functional activity corresponding to that which took place in the bone before the injury are formed.

Approximately this will be the treatment of the damaged area and on the patient's bones.

The method of bone processing presented by Australian researchers not only accelerates healing and reduces the time of surgery (after complex fractures), but also, most likely, will become a kind of panacea for acute bone tissue damage with the destruction of a significant part of a particular bone, which occurs very often after sports injuries or road accidents.

Now scientists are preparing the development for clinical trials, hoping that they will be successful and open their invention to the whole medical world.

Prepared based on the materials of the University of Wollongong: BioPen to rewrite orthopedic implants surgery.

Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru 09.12.2013