Printing Implantable Cartilage
Combining ink jet printing and electrospinning technologies, bioengineers at Wake Forest University’s Institute for Regenerative Medicine have fabricated an artificial cartilage that has proven successful in animal studies. As this piece reports: “. . . flexible mats of electrospun synthetic polymer were combined, layer-by-layer, with a solution of cartilage cells from a rabbit ear that were deposited using a traditional ink-jet printer. A week after testing the strength of the mats, the researchers tested them to determine whether the cartilage cells were still alive. Then, to determine how the mats performed, the scientists inserted them into mice for two, four, and eight weeks. Following implantation for eight weeks, the constructs appeared to have developed the structures and properties that are typical of elastic cartilage.” MORE
Image Credit: Wake Forest University’s Institute for Regenerative Medicine