Last week I wrote about an exciting new technology that is using 3-D printers to make implants or ‘scaffolding’ that is being used in research for a method to repair spinal cord injuries. Since then I have seen the paper published in the ‘Nature Medicine’ Journal titled ‘Biomimetic 3D-printed scaffolds for spinal cord injury repair’.
The printing technology used by the team is quite incredible – it is able to produce 2mm-sized implants in 1.6 seconds. Although the research so far has only been limited to rats, the research team believes this process is scalable to human spinal cord sizes. As proof of concept, the researchers printed four centimetre-sized implants which were modelled from MRI scans of actual human spinal cord injuries; inplants were printed within 10 minutes.
The implants are made from a hydrogel and contain lots of tiny channels which are only 200 micrometers wide (which is twice the width of a human hair). The channels in the implant guide the nerve stem cells and axon growth along the spinal cord injuries. The hydrogel scaffold produced by the 3-D printers mimic central nervous system structures. Once the implants were grafted, new spinal cord tissue had regrown completely across the injury and connected the severed ends of the rat’s spinal cord after only a few months.
One of the research team from San Diego is Professor Wei Zhu and described how the use of 3-D printing can be used to make implants. He said, ”This shows the flexibility of our 3D printing technology. We can quickly print out an implant that’s just right to match the injured site of the host spinal cord regardless of the size and shape.”
Watch this space!
3-D printed hydrogel spinal implant