Laser-Welded Sugar: 3D-Printing Blood Vessels the Sweeter Way
Bioengineers at Rice University have created artificial blood vessels using templates of 3-D printed sugar.
We have come a long way in modern medicine. We’ve got vaccines, MRI scanners, and we know that mercury pills don’t make you immortal. Without these innovations, our society wouldn’t what it is today.
Innovations in the field of medicine are capable of saving thousands of lives every day. For example, millions of lives have been saved by vaccines and thousands of cancer patients are saved during the early stages of the condition by chemotherapy radiation.
Another one of these amazing innovations is artificial blood vessels. For those who don’t know, blood vessels are a part of the circulatory system and function to transport blood throughout the body. Blood vessels are essential to the distribution of oxygen throughout your body and help to get rid of waste materials like carbon dioxide. Without blood vessels, we would not survive.
However, some people don’t have functioning blood vessels. Diseases like atherosclerosis (a disease of the arteries caused by the deposition of plaques of fatty material on the inner walls) kill 18 million people a year! If patients can have artificial blood vessels replace their affected ones, thousands of lives could be saved.
In the past, a few solutions have come up:
- Researchers from the Medical University of Vienna have developed artificial blood vessels made from a special elastomer material.
- Biomedical engineers from the University of Minnesota created artificial blood vessels that are capable of growth within the recipient and implanted them in young lambs.
How Was This Done?
As I said before, the sugar templates used to create the blood vessel networks were 3-D printed with a modified, open-source laser cutter in the lab of study co-author and assistant professor of bioengineering at Rice University Jordan Miller.
Using a commercial carbon dioxide laser cutter to create OpenSLS (shown to the left), an open-source, selective laser sintering platform, researchers at the Miller Lab at Rice University are capable of printing complex 3-D objects from biomaterials and powdered plastics. The OpenSLS’ ability to create such intricate shapes and creations played an imperative role in making this project succesful.
Jordan Miller even stated,
“The 3D-printing process we developed here is like making a very precise creme brulee,”
This project uses laser sintering, a 3D-printing process that fuses minute grains of powder into solid 3D objects, which is very useful because it gives more control to the user to create more complex structures in all three dimensions while maintaining the utility of the material you use, which in this case is sugar.
Why Sugar?
This innovation is amazing and is definitely a game-changer for medicine, but why make the 3-D templates out of sugar in the first place? It does seem a little taboo because a medicinal invention is made of sugar. However, there are some structural benefits and good reasoning behind it.
Sugar is durable when dry, so it’s really useful in creating templates for blood vessels. It also rapidly dissolves in water without damaging the nearby cells, which is important for the situation we are in.
Sugar crystals are also small enough to be able to make detailed creations beautifully and correctly, especially when powdered, and precision must be perfect to make this innovation possible for real-world use.
How Were the Blood Vessels Made?
I mentioned before that the artificial blood vessels were made using 3-dimensional templates made from sugar.
Ian Kinslinger (shown to the left), the lead author of the study, used a special blend of sugars to print templates and then filled the space around the printed networks with a mixture of cells in a liquid gel. Within minutes, they became semisolid and the sugar dissolved and flushed away to leave an open passageway for nutrients and oxygen to flow through.
“A major benefit of this approach is the speed at which we can generate each tissue structure. We can create some of the largest tissue models yet demonstrated in under five minutes.”
Why Does This Matter?
This is all fine and dandy, but why does this even need to be made? We are already born with blood vessels, and those are good enough, right? Why do we even need artificial blood vessels?
This invention has the potential to help millions of people around the world with cardiovascular diseases. Johns Hopkins Medical Center estimates 78 million Americans have the most common form of vascular disease, high blood pressure. Diseased blood vessels make it harder for the heart to pump blood to the rest of the body. The condition, if untreated, can cause serious problems, such as coronary artery spasms, heart attacks, and congestive heart failure.
This invention can save millions of lives, including people with vascular diseases like peripheral artery disease (PAD), abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA), and carotid artery disease (CAD).
Obviously, this invention has to go through intense testing to actually work, so it is cannot be used by the general public just yet.
However, I do believe that this invention’s potential is high and that it will save many lives in the future. Innovation and invention never stop, and unique and amazing creations like these sugar-printed 3-D templates are what help keep the world running.
