德国科学家研发出打印人造血管的技术

Researchers have been working at growing tissue and organs in the laboratory for a long time. These days, tissue engineering enables us to build up artificial tissue, although science still hasn’t been successful with larger organs. Now, researchers at Fraunhofer are applying new techniques and materials to come up with artificial blood vessels in their BioRap project that will be able to supply artificial tissue and maybe even complex organs in future. They are exhibiting their findings at the Biotechnica Fair that will be taking place in Hannover, Germany on October 11-13.

There were more than 11,000 persons on the waiting list for organ transplantation in Germany alone at the beginning of this year, although on the average hardly half as many transplantations are performed. The aim of tissue engineering is to create organs in the laboratory for opening up new opportunities in this field. Unfortunately, researchers have still not been able to supply artificial tissue with nutrients because they do not have the necessary vascular system. Five Fraunhofer-institutes joined forces in 2009 to come up with biocompatible artificial blood vessels. It seemed impossible to build structures such as capillary vessels that are so small and complex and it was especially the branches and spaces that made life difficult for the researchers. But production engineering came to the rescue because rapid prototyping makes it possible to build workpieces specifically according to any complex 3-D model. Now, scientists at Fraunhofer are working on transferring this technology to the generation of tiny biomaterial structures by combining two different techniques: the 3-D printing technology established in rapid prototyping and multiphoton polymerization developed in polymer science.