Replacement cartilage can grow in any shape with 3D-printed “spheroids”
Published in Bioprinting.
Researchers at TU Wien have developed a new way to grow cartilage from stem cells and guide it into basically any shape required. The breakthrough could lead to better ways to patch up injuries.
Cartilage is the rubbery tissue in joints that acts like a cushion to stop bones rubbing against each other. But as important as it is, it has almost no regenerative ability in adults, so when it’s damaged due to injury or just decades of wear-and-tear, it can lead to painful chronic conditions like osteoarthritis.
Scientists are investigating how to make artificial replacement materials, but it’s looking like nothing will be able to top nature’s own stuff. So, another potential solution is to find ways to regenerate natural cartilage using stem cells, but this brings up other issues, including how to get them to grow in the right shape, with clumps of these stem cells often changing shape or shrinking.
For the new study, the TU Wien team developed a technique that can grow samples of cartilage into basically any shape needed, which they demonstrated by forming it into the university’s logo. The key innovation isn’t so much the stem cells but the container they’re put in – tiny, hollow, 3D-printed “spheroids” that can be connected to each other like building blocks, providing a scaffold for the cartilage stem cells inside.
“Under the microscope, you can see very clearly: neighboring spheroids grow together, the cells migrate from one spheroid to the other and vice versa, they connect seamlessly and result in a closed structure without any cavities – in contrast to other methods that have been used so far, in which visible interfaces remain between neighboring cell clumps,” said Oliver Kopinski-Grünwald, an author of the study.
https://newatlas.com/medical/cartilage-stem-cells-any-shape-3d-printed-spheroids/