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Microscale medical devices for faster tissue engineering by ferujkll sdff
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Microscale medical devices for faster tissue engineering |
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Business,Business News,Business Opportunities
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In the emerging field of tissue engineering, scientists encouragecells to grow on carefully designed support scaffolds. The ultimategoal is to create living structures that might one day be used toreplace lost or damaged tissue, but the manufacture ofappropriately detailed scaffolds presents a significant challengethat has kept most tissue engineering applications confined to theresearch lab. Now a team of researchers from the Laser ZentrumHannover (LZH) eV Institute in Hannover, Germany, and the JointDepartment of Biomedical Engineering at the University of NorthCarolina at Chapel Hill and North Carolina State University havemodified a manufacturing technique called two-photon polymerization(2PP) to create finely detailed structures such as tissue scaffoldsmore quickly and efficiently than was previously possible. The newtechnique, which the team describes in a paper published this weekin the Optical Society's (OSA) open-access journal Biomedical Optics Express, could help pave the way to more wide-spread clinical use ofmicroscale medical devices. Many important biological functions take place on the microscopiclevel and as medical research advances into this Lilliputian realm,scientists have turned to precise techniques such as 2PP to createthe tiny tools necessary to manipulate cells and other minisculestructures.
In current-generation 2PP technology, a laser pulsethat lasts approximately one quadrillionth of a second sends aburst of energy into unset resin, causing the molecules around thepulse to fuse together into two adjoining cone shapes. By focusingon multiple points in succession, 2PP can build up complex 3Dstructures, cone-shaped block by cone-shaped block. 2PP can be used to manufacture devices from a wide range of basematerials and does not require extreme temperatures, harshchemicals, or cleanroom facilities, but its main drawback is longfabrication times. Like in a tiled mosaic, small 2PP buildingblocks can create a richly detailed design, but if you want a largestructure, like a tissue scaffold that could mimic natural bodyparts, it can take a long time to lay all the pieces together. "Blood vessel networks can be several centimeters in length, butwalls of the smallest branches (capillaries) are only a fewmicrometers thick.
The same applies with any tissue. Many tissuesmay be large, but they all have important features on themicroscale," says team member Shaun Gittard of the LZH. The teamnotes that using conventional 2PP to manufacture the tissuescaffolds for such structures could be prohibitively slow. Theyaddress the problem by using a computer-controlled hologram tosplit the 2PP laser into multiple beams, creating up to 16different focus points that can work simultaneously. "As an example, take the time for fabricating a single layered,1-millimeter square with 100 nanometer resolution," the authorswrite.
"With conventional single-focus 2PP at one millimeter persecond, the fabrication time would be 2 hours and 47 minutes. Incontrast, with 16 foci this same area could be scanned in merely 10minutes." Or, in other words, many foci make light work. The team first tested their multiple foci system by creating 16miniature Venus statues, each so small as to be invisible to thehuman eye (see figure 1). "The Venus is kind of a logo of ourresearch group," says Gittard. "We have used it as a familiardemonstration structure for various fabrication techniques." In addition to replicas of classic Greek artwork, the team alsoused the new technique to manufacture cylindrical tissue scaffolds(see figures 2 and 3) and an array of microneedles.
Less than ahalf millimeter wide, rocket-shaped microneedles can be used toprovide painless injections or take blood samples, notes Gittard(see figure 4). "One of the biggest promises in the future isreal-time, pain-free glucose sensing and insulin delivery fortreating diabetes ," he says. For now the team has only used the multiple beams to createmultiple copies of the same structure. Their next goal is to usethe system to produce one large, complex 3-D structure, which is amore complicated task since it requires moving the relativeplacement of the different foci during the fabrication process,Gittard says. "The ability to produce large-scale devices with sub-micronfeatures is exciting, as many cell features, such as organelles,are on this size scale," the authors write.
Gittard explains thatsuch detailed features could be used to control cell attachment andalignment, which is important since cell orientation affectsfunction in a number of tissues, such as blood vessels, nerves,bone, and muscle. Additional References Citations. I am a professional writer from Luggage, Bags & Cases, which contains a great deal of information about waterproof surveillance camera , waterproof ccd camera, welcome to visit!
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