HYBRID EVENT: You can participate in person at London, UK or Virtually from your home or work.

3rd Edition of International Conference on Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine

August 21-23, 2023

August 21 -23, 2023 | London, UK
TERMC 2023

Lauren R Harrison

Lauren R Harrison, Speaker at 
Regenerative Medicine Conferences
McGill University, Canada
Title : The development of an open-source low-cost 3d “micro”-bioprinter

Abstract:

The impact of three dimensional (3D) bioprinting within the tissue engineering field has grown significantly in recent decades. 3D bioprinting allows for automated and accurate high- throughput fabrication of functional tissues and organs using a layer-by-layer bottom-up printing approach using bioinks. The expansion of this field can be attributed to the huge advancement of commercial bioprinters, however, the high cost of these printers ($10,000 to $200,000+) make them highly inaccessible. Additionally, the proprietary software of these printers poses significant limitations to innovation within the bioprinting industry. As a result, cost-effective custom-built bioprinters have gained increased attention in the last several years. The objective of this work is to build a novel ‘micro’-bioprinter for less than $800 (USD) using an off-the-shelf 3D filament-base printer that is open-source and accessible. We designed this device using a micropipette to hold and print the bioink, reducing sample waste and allowing for working volumes less than 1ml. The bioprinter is also equipment with a bioink heating element and allows for automatic bioink refilling. Using alginate-gelatin hydrogels with and without decellularized extracellular matrix (dECM), the printing accuracy was evaluated and compared to a commercially available bioprinter, GESIM BioScaffolder 3.1. Overall, we demonstrated the feasibility of developing cost-effective bioprinters of equal caliber to commercially available bioprinters. Future work is required to quantify the success of cell-laden bioprinting using our custom-built bioprinter.

Biography:

Lauren R. Harrison is a 5th year undergraduate student studying Bioengineering at McGill University, Canada. Lauren has completed several research internships in bioinformatics, developing software for protein modelling and simulation. Outside of academia, Lauren worked at a Robotics start-up company in Montreal, Canada, building painting robots to replicate fine art paintings for 2 years.

Watsapp