April 30, 2024

“Cryobioprinting” Serves Up Towers of Frozen Cells for Tissue Engineering, Regenerative Medicine, and Drug Discovery

Zhang and colleagues used a cryoprotected bioink loaded with cells to print tissue constructs on a personalized freezing plate. The team enhanced and evaluated the strategy, finding that it might consistently produce tissue constructs that might possibly be used as implants and tissue items.
In Advanced Materials, Zhang and co-authors report on using the cryoprotected bioink to develop vertical, 3D structures that imitate complex, delicate, and anisotropic tissues discovered in the body. Lots of tissues in the body, consisting of muscles and nerve cells, are anisotropic, implying that they have properties that are various in various instructions. The structures the researchers created were likewise anisotropic, with microscale pores aligned in the vertical instructions. As a proof-of-concept, the team built a muscle-tendon system using myoblasts (cells that can generate muscle cells) and fibroblasts (cells that produce structural frameworks in connective tissue). The group likewise produced a muscle-microvascular system.
The researchers note that this work represents very early technological presentations and will still need substantial recognition and tests before usage in the clinic, but the two documents represent an essential action forward.
” As the field of tissue engineering is growing quickly, these produced tissue constructs may find a huge selection of applications in muscle engineering and beyond,” stated Zhang.
References:
” Freeform cell-laden cryobioprinting for shelf-ready tissue fabrication and storage” by Hossein Ravanbakhsh, Zeyu Luo, Xiang Zhang, Sushila Maharjan, Hengameh S. Mirkarimi, Guosheng Tang, Carolina Chávez-Madero, Luc Mongeau and Yu Shrike Zhang, 21 December 2021, Matter.DOI: 10.1016/ j.matt.2021.11.020.
” Support Bath-Free Vertical Extrusion Cryo( bio) printing for Anisotropic Tissue Manufacturing” by Zeyu Luo, Guosheng Tang, Hossein Ravanbakhsh, Wanlu Li, Mian Wang, Xiao Kuang, Carlos Ezio Garciamendez-Mijares, Liming Lian, Sili Yi, Junlong Liao, Maobin Xie, Jie Guo, Zongke Zhou and Yu Shrike Zhang, 21 December 2021, Advanced Materials.DOI: 10.1002/ adma.202108931.
Funding: The authors acknowledge support by the Brigham Research Institute. Work was likewise supported by the FRQNTs International Internship Award (279390 ), MITACS Globalink Research Award (IT14553), McGills Graduate Mobility Award, McGills Doctoral Internship Award, the FRQNTs Postdoctoral Fellowship (296447 ), Program of China Scholarship Council (No. 201807045057), the High-Level Talent Internationalization Training Program of Henan Province (No. 2019004), the National Institute on Deafness and other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant numbers R01DC005788 and R01DC014461.

Zhang and coworkers used a cryoprotected bioink laden with cells to print tissue constructs on a personalized freezing plate. The team optimized and assessed the technique, finding that it could consistently make tissue constructs that could possibly be used as implants and tissue items.
In Advanced Materials, Zhang and co-authors report on using the cryoprotected bioink to create vertical, 3D structures that imitate complex, fragile, and anisotropic tissues discovered in the human body. As a proof-of-concept, the group constructed a muscle-tendon system using myoblasts (cells that can offer rise to muscle cells) and fibroblasts (cells that produce structural frameworks in connective tissue).

Cryobioprinting examples. Credit: Y. Shrike Zhang
Scientist created a technique that combines bioprinting with cryopreservation to construct frozen, cell-laden structures that can be used in tissue engineering, regenerative medication, and drug discovery.
A brand-new strategy takes bioprinting– in which an ink of cells is printed, layer by layer, to form a structure– to a whole brand-new, and icy level. Investigators from the Zhang lab at Brigham and Womens Hospital have established a technology that they call “cryobioprinting,” an approach that utilizes a bioink ingrained with cells to print frozen, intricate structures that can be easily stored for later use. The group presented cryobioprinting in a paper just recently published in Matter and more described how to use the innovation to muscle engineering in a paper simply published in Advanced Materials.
” Cryobioprinting can give bioprinted tissue an extended service life. We revealed up to three months of storage, however it could be much longer,” stated Y. Shrike Zhang, PhD, senior author of both papers and an associate bioengineer in the Brighams Department of Medicine. “And the distinct variation, or what we call the vertical 3D cryobioprinting strategy weve explained, may have broad application in tissue engineering, regenerative medication, drug discovery and customized therapeutics.”