Biofabrication has existed as a concept for many decades to refer to technologies for fabricating living tissue constructs in the field of tissue engineering and regenerative medicine. The collective ambition across thousands of scientists, hospitals, and labs remains the creation of entire solid human organs to address the urgent demand for transplantable living organs that the donor system is unable to meet. Within this research are also approaches to organ-on-a-chip/microphysiological systems that are already transforming the trajectory of how we develop medicines, evaluate cosmetics and materials without animal testing, and finally gain more systemic understanding of pivotal under-researched areas such as human reproductive health and the behavior of nimble systemic cancers.
But this phrase has now also been co-opted by industrial design and product development as the label for the customer and designer driven movement to get beyond traditional manufacturing methods towards sustainable and nature-inspired approaches that lean on living organisms and biological materials as the means to create new materials and products. Everything from fibers and textiles, “vegan leather,” and carbon-capturing construction materials, to fully compostable packing peanuts and highly optimized hypoallergenic skin contact materials that outperform conventional animal-grown hairs and synthetic fibers.
This course gleefully embraces both of these definitions at the same time!
This Topics in ITP 2-credit course starts with the students modifying off-the-shelf low-costs 3D printers into a syringe-extruder bioprinting platform suited to FRESH bioprinting, a unique form of embedded fabrication that is well suited to a range of compelling biomaterials and biofabrication targets within the scope of what materials are safe for students to handle and process in the ITP Materials Kitchen. By building these extruders, modifying these printers, and learning to process a wide range of unique biomaterials, students will have mastered the skills needed to build, tune, and operate this equipment in future collaborations with local area science labs and startups. As a bonus, this course works directly with the inventors of the open source FRESH bioprinting process to evaluate and test unreleased new innovations in bioprinter extruder designs, and the students will join the instructor to participate as affiliates in the collaborative FRESH scientific community, including sharing back improvements in machine modification, slicing, and machine operation with other scientists and physicians working with FRESH.
On the biofabrication side, the “analog materials” that we use with the FRESH bioprinters that mimic the natural extracellular matrix (ECM) of biological systems are not only a means of testing and exploring the type of embedded fabrication used in “direct writing” delivery of living cells, these materials are also the key materials used in the industrial design research into sustainable design via biofabrication: collagen, gelatin, alginate, hyaluronic acid, fibrin, chitosan, PEG, and several others. Drawing on a wide range of safe biomaterial exploration introduced by molecular gastronomy and sustainable materials research, students will learn protocols and modifications of materials that may prove useful to them elsewhere in their art and design practices.
It might be something of a lucky coincidence that both the biological research and new materials research overlap with so many of their materials exploration, but this course will make a claim that these parallel efforts share commonalities. This course aims to introduce students to this pioneering technology with attention to how creative technologists might also repurpose these approaches for working with their own target materials and objectives, intervening with these technologies. The creative problem solving that scientists, engineers, clinicians, and biomaterials experts go through to find their route to sustaining living cells and tissues parallels how artists, designers, engineers, and architects look to harvest new properties and capabilities out of their materials. Just as the bioprinting platforms we construct in this course are flexible to multiple goals and materials processes, we will encourage our thinking to also look to learn unexpected properties and potentials from the materials and protocols we encounter.