Sweet Science: 3D Printed Sugar Templates for Regenerative Medicine

Blood vessel networks that permeate human organs provide the lifeblood for resident cells, but their construction has been a major challenge to the scale-up of engineered living tissues. 3D printing of glassy, edible sugars with an open-source RepRap 3D printer provided a sacrificial template for rapidly casting vascular networks and creating perfusable living tissues. This talk is also a call-to-arms highlighting the need for increased development of open source technologies for scientific research.

About Jordan Miller
Jordan is a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, a founding member of Hive76 in Philadelphia, and a RepRap core developer. His research in the department of Bioengineering combines chemistry and rapid prototyping to direct cultured human cells to form more complex organizations of living vessels and tissues. Jordan has been in the 3D maker community since the beginning. He developed the MakerBot heated build platform at Hive76 and is delighted to use his RepRap 3D printer every day in the lab for biomedical research and regenerative medicine.