ADDITIVE MANUFACTURING
living tissues of all kinds,” including skin, bone, cartilage, lung and heart, Cabrera said. “I guess the biggest challenge is just the number of people who have access to this technology,” he said. “They recently became more accessible in terms of price and usability.” Cabrera said that, typically, a machine’s human interfac-
es are bad and installation takes a long time, both of which exclude a lot of people from using the technology. “Biobots’ is designed to actually be fun to use,” Cabrera said. “It might seem like a detail, but it’s actually a huge part of why people use it.”
Information-Sharing Tools Emerge Cabrera and SME’s McDaniel both said there’s a need for an open-access materials database so individual research- ers don’t have to start from the beginning to fi gure out which cells and tissues work best with which scaffold mate- rials, for example. “It’s not so clear which materials are going to end up being a good substitute for the natural things we have in the body,” Cabrera said. Cabrera’s company in March launched a wiki, entitled “Build With Life.” The page includes information about
“If they know what’s been done and what’s been proven,
and where to fi nd the information, it’s going to get them quicker to an evidence-based outcome,” she said. “Which is going to get it quicker to an accepted practice and out- side of being considered experimental and so it would be eligible for reimbursement.” Additionally, two peer-reviewed medical journals are emerging as tools for sharing information. The International Journal of Bioprinting is a biannual, double-blind, open- access journal whose fi rst edition was published last year. Penn State’s Ozbolat is on its editorial board. Bioprinting is scheduled for a fi rst edition this year. Anthony Atala, a Wake Forest physician who heads the university’s Institute for Re- generative Medicine, will serve as its editor-in-chief.
Patient Privacy Confounds
Another issue medical bioprinting faces is related to pa- tient privacy, McDaniel said.
In Ibrahim Tarik Ozbolat’s lab’s work with 3D-printed pancreatic islets, (the clusters of up to hundreds of cells in the pancreas that secrete insulin and other hormones) the islets sprouted capillaries into the supporting scaffold.
established biotechnologies, methods for tissue fabrication, advances in biology and in the ability to design and engineer living things.
The wiki entry’s home page seeks contributions that would “add momentum to a growing movement aimed at adding transparency and enabling collaborations across biology.” McDaniel takes the long-term view and thinks about how having an open database would facilitate getting engineered tissues and organs into people much sooner.
52
AdvancedManufacturing.org | June 2016
She and a committee that both Atala and Ozbolat sit on, the SME Medical Additive Manufacturing/3D Printing Workgroup, are concerned with bioprinting fi le formats and ensuring compliance with the federal Health Insur- ance Portability and Account- ability Act, aka HIPAA, among other issues. HIPAA, which carries stiff penalties for infractions, was enacted to protect patient privacy. McDaniel believes embed- ding a patient’s name in his fi le will better guarantee the patient’s privacy. But, she said, the standard fi le formats used in bioprinting, such as .stl, are for coordinates and data, not patient names and information. “The device makers who
have developed this have said they’ve had to develop nondigital ways to track patient names because it does not accommodate the patient’s information,” McDaniel said, conjuring up visions of notes attached to bioprinted tissues with paper clips.
Approvals for Use in Humans Sought
Those visions of notes and paper clips leads to—what else?—thoughts of paperwork and administrative functions.
Image courtesy Penn State University.
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