Organs damaged by disease or engineering focuses on tissue and orinjury can be replaced with gan regeneration. Bioinks are tailored healthy organs from donors to the tissue being transplanted and drawbacks to transplantation, including the threat of infection, the scarcity of donated organs, and the possibility of rejection by the recipient’s immune system. This has inspired tissue engineers to create risk-free lab-based substitutes.
The development of 3D printing technology in recent years has made it possible to fabricate intricate parts layer compatible substances like a hydrogel. The scaffolds are 3D printed, keeping structural and functional compatibility with human tissues, ranging from soft tissues to bone, which are the most often transplanted tissues. Bioprinting is a method of tissue replication that uses ‘bioinks’ which are engineered to print artificial living tissues like skin using transplants. However, there are are made of cultivated cells and bioused during bioprinting. Bioprinting temporarily or permanently supports and nurtures living cells.
The ‘Mito Plus’ bio 3D printer from Avay Biosciences is a brand-new, cutting-edge domestic model that can manufacture human tissues. The Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru, the top-ranked science research institution according to NIRF rankings, has installed the first Mito Plus prototype.
The paucity of appropriate organ donors results in thousands of deaths annually in India alone. A transplant can cost more than Rs 10 lakhs, not considering the price of anti-rejection medications, even if a person is successful in finding one.
Because organs are made up of a variety of tissues, the first step in the tissue reproduction process is called bioprinting. Bioinks are substances created to sustain the structural integrity of the tissue while enabling a certain type of cell to proliferate and reproduce.
Mito Plus was introduced at the Bengaluru Tech Summit. It is a more sophisticated version of the bio 3D printer created by Basu with input on the prototype coming from Dr Bikramjit’s research lab at IISc. Avay, which was co-founded by an IIT Madras graduate, also developed the printer.
It is one of India’s most sophisticated 3D bioprinters. For end-to-end bio 3D printing solutions in India, Avay Biosciences develops both software and hardware entirely in-house.
IIT Madras, Institute of Chemical Technology (ICT), Mumbai, National Institute of Pharmaceutical Education and Research (NIPER), Hyderabad, and BITS Pilani (Goa campus) are just a few of the prestigious research and development institutions that the start-up has already partnered with as clients and collaborators.
Various bioprinting industry reports estimate that the worldwide 3D bioprinting market would be worth $1.3 billion in 2022 and $3.3 billion in 2027. The pharmaceutical and cosmetics industries are experiencing tremendous demand.
Explaining Mito Plus’ main applications, Avay Biosciences CEO Manish Amin stated, “Mito Plus is one of the advanced bioprinters at its pricing range”. In Mito Plus, a variety of biomaterials can be printed. Additionally, this printer will feature built-in UV curing capabilities. The printer contains a HEPA filter, but its key feature is temperature control, which allows the printhead and printbed to be warmed or cooled by up to 80°Celsius. Mito Plus has applications in the development and testing of pharmaceutical drugs, as well as in cancer biology and cosmetology.
“Bioprinters work in almost the exact same way as other 3D printers, with one major difference, i.e., instead of delivering materials such as plastic,
The team behind Mito Plus 3D bioprinters. Bioprinting temporarily or permanently supports and nurtures living cells
metal, or powders, bioprinters deposit layers of biomaterials, that may include living cells, to build complex structures like skin tissue, liver tissue, etc.,” Amin added, explaining how 3D bio printing functions and can be an alternative to organ transplants.
“3D bioprinting is a special gift from science and technology to humanity. Nevertheless, there are still a lot of problems that need to be resolved. Before we can produce fully functional and healthy organs for human transplant, there is still a long way to go,” he said.
The 3D printers were created internally by Avay Biosciences, with over 70% of the manufacturing taking place in Chennai and Bengaluru. They have a devoted software staff working on improving and introducing new features all the time.
Suhridh Sundaram, chief operating officer of Avay Biosciences, further commented on the research that would benefit from the launch of Mito Plus, stating that “our approach to the creation of entirely new organs begins with the journey of creating new tissue samples — a critical stepping stone for a very long-term and difficult journey. We are working with ICT Mumbai to have our printers create skin, the most prevalent form of layered tissue that could aid those who have suffered severe burns. Additionally, toxicological screenings and other testing methods can employ these tissues.” Typically, extracellular matrix (ECM) that is native to a particular cell is attempted to be recreated through bioprinting using a variety of polymers. The development of artificial organs hinges on the availability of affordable bioprinters because all upcoming research will be reliant on this infrastructure. Live cells and biomaterials/ bioinks are used in the bioprinting process to produce functional human tissues and organs. Bioprinting can be used to create fake meat, a diet of the future, if animal cells are employed.
The creation of various macromolecules will enable bioinks to best mimic native human tissues. Previous attempts at 3D bioprinting using digital light processing (DLP) have used UV light to selectively crosslink macromolecules to produce the scaffold. This technology uses UV radiation, which is known to damage DNA in cells during printing even though it can print complex structures at a high resolution. Instead of using UV light to solve this problem, Kaushik Chatterjee (an associate professor in the Department of Materials Engineering, IISc, Bengaluru) and his team used visible blue light radiation (405 nm). Building tissue scaffolds that physically and functionally imitate the tissue microenvironment appears to be a promising use for this new method. They have used this approach in two recent research to create tissue scaffolds from proteins and polysaccharides.
