 the studio and my guests today are Lucero of UC Davis. Mark is associate professor of biomedical engineering, he's also the co-director of the team lab and a researcher of in the Genome Center and Steven is a development engineer in the department of biomedical engineering and the manager of the team lab. Welcome gentlemen, I'm so glad you're here, spending a little time with us. The title or the topic today is 3D bioprinting. Very exciting. So I'm going to start with the central question and I'll start with Steven. Sure. What is, before we go to bioprinting, let's talk about 3D printing. Sure. Could you tell us in just a few words to people who don't know anything about it including me? Absolutely. Yes. So 3D printing is basically just another mechanism by which we manufacture things. Okay. So traditionally when we talk about making things we typically start with a block of material and subtract material until we end up with the geometry that we want. But 3D printing is kind of the opposite of that. So you start with bays or banks of material and you deposit them typically in layers until you end up with the geometry that you want. An example of a material that you use in your lab. So the most common of which would just be some type of plastic. So many of the kind of printers that are becoming more consumer grade and available to a wide range of people work with plastics without getting too specific. They typically use a polymer called PLA or ABS. So when you say layers, it's sort of like a sewing machine? It goes back and forth. It could be thought of like that. So typically you would take a three-dimensional object and break it up into a series of stacked two-dimensional layers and deposit those one by one until you end up with a three-dimensional object. Would be an analogy, would be a good analogy to say like a cap scan? Actually yeah, that's not too far off. So CT imaging typically works in layers as well. Right and actually we often utilize medical imaging data in 3D printing especially in the lab that I work in. And we're going to talk about your lab and the projects. That's wonderful. Now Mark, what is 3D bioprinting? Well if 3D printing is like taking an image that you have in your computer and making a real object out of it, whether it's plastic or some other material, that object is usually dead. It's non-living. 3D bioprinting is basically doing the same thing but printing something that has living parts. That's living. Like what? Like, I mean our fantasy is to be able to print organs for instance. If you have a diseased organ, you would love to be able to have a picture of what a replacement would be like and be able to print out a new organ using somebody's own cells. That would be the ultimate kind of application. And we're going to talk a little more about this but it's a fascinating and of course it leads to a lot of science fiction interpretation of this. But that is coming, isn't it? That's coming. And I understand that you do do a little bit of bioprinting in your lab. So we are starting now. The technology is very, very new because of the materials are more delicate than the plastics. There's a lot and sometimes you have to mix multiple materials. It's a little more complicated than the traditional 3D printing. So it's a brand new technology and we're just starting now with a couple of projects where we're going to print plant cells in certain shapes with a collaborator on campus. Fascinating. She's got some really cool ideas. You should have her on and talk about that when that project comes out. I will. I'm going to. And then I'm hoping to have some students print some gels with bacteria that produce cellulose. And so we can make custom-made cellulose sheets from these biocellulose sheets. And what we envision is something like a custom wound dressing. You might be able to take a scan of some area that needs a dressing and print basically a custom wound dressing that's made out of biological material. And I believe that we have some images here, first of all, of your lab. And by the way, a team, I believe, is an acronym for. Translating Engineering Advances to Medicine. Say it again. Translating Engineering Advances to Medicine. Excellent. Perfect. Excellent. You passed the test. So this is the first image that we have here. And this is an image of your lab. Correct. So what we're looking at here is just one of the three hubs of this facility. I see. So in this space, we typically do a lot of 3D printing, but also CAD development. So before we can feed the printer an object to print, we first need to develop that object. So those types of activities take place in this area. And this is a very mysterious object. So Mark or Stephen, tell us what it is. Good luck, Mark. Stephen built this, so I'm going to leave it up to him. So this is just an example object of something that can be manufactured within the team facility. So this is somewhat related to bio-printing, but this is more along the mechanical side of 3D printing. And this is just a medical device. So this is a prototype that is going to be manufactured or 3D printed. It will be eventually mass produced. I see. But this one was printed. It is a medical device. Now this, obviously these two individuals are not you. That's correct. But what are they doing? Let's keep them anonymous, but what are they doing? We didn't have any releases for them. No, we don't. So in this case, these are students who are actively working within the lab. Specifically, they're working on their senior design project. So we open the team lab for use by our students. Yes. And in this case, they're actually working on a circuit board that they developed. I see. That will be contained within a 3D printed housing and a couple other little bits and pieces that were laser cut. Yes. And this is also very mysterious, but perhaps, Mark, what you were saying about repairing wounds. Yes. Can you tell us? Just to be clear, this is not our work. This is from a recent publication. Yes. This is a piece of 3D printed cartilage. So the researchers in this particular study were trying to figure how to print replacement cartilage. And so they printed this material that's kind of gooey, just like cartilage would be. And it's embedded with living cells. Oh, interesting. And they used a printer that looks a lot like what Stephen uses to print some of the other shapes that you saw in the other images to print this kind of grid pattern that's embedded with cells. And there's going to potentially be used for growing new cartilage. But that is interesting. So I can tell that your lab is all set up for the future. Yes. One thing that I want to mention about your lab is that you also are a service facility. In other words, especially for small businesses technical companies, you provide expertise and also facilities for them to do their work. And one other thing I want to mention, we have very little time unfortunately, but if you go to the website of your lab, there is a lot of information about what you do and the people who work and on what they work and your services as well are listed. And one thing that I was very happy about was the video that you have there. It's an excellent introduction to what you do. And the images are really very nice. So there'll be the website displayed. And if you need, if you have information, I mean, questions. Sure. Go straight to the website, describes all of what we offer and some contact information to find out more, contact Stephen or myself. Yes. And I hope to have you again with more projects. Unfortunately, we have very little time. But in closing, I would like to go into a little bit of science fiction. And I found a mind boggling video. And hopefully we'll have a few minutes or two to comment on it. So let's show this video and see what 3D bioprinting may be able to do in the future. And something of food for thought in your lab. Maybe you can show it to your very imaginative graduate students. So if we can have the video, we can then talk about it. Bioprinters will output many types of cells as well as a dissolvable gel to support and protect the cells during printing. Organs will then be built up in a great many layers. Over several hours, a complete replacement kidney, liver, heart or other body part will thereby be created. Replacement organs will be output to individual patient specification. As every body part printed will be created from a culture of a patient's own cells, so the risk of organ transplant rejection should be very low indeed. Some future bioprinters are likely to add cells directly to the human body. Sometime next decade, doctors may therefore be able to scan wounds and spray on layers of cells to very rapidly heal them. One day, keyhole bioprinters may even repair organs inside a patient during an operation. Insitu bioprinting could even have cosmetic applications. For example, face printers may be created. These would evaporate existing flesh and simultaneously replace it with new cells. People could therefore download a face scan from the internet and have it applied to themselves. Alternatively, some teenagers may have their own face scanned and then reapplied every few years to achieve apparent perpetual use. Comments, quick comments. So that's a pretty optimistic view on the future of bioprinting. Yes. It is somewhat feasible, maybe not within our lifetimes. It would be a stretch. It's hard to predict how fast it'll go. I think that's a very wise comment. It's a great goal. We're not there yet, but it's a great thing to shoot for. I particularly like the part where you can store your face when you were a teenager and then apply any time. So can you build me a new body, please? So that would require some advances in a number of fields. Medical imaging would have to get quite a bit better than it currently is. But also 3D printing would have to advance as well. So that may be a ways out. And we could have a long discussion about ethics and whether we should be doing those things too. That's true, because there is an ethical problem or question, rather. One thing that you mentioned, Mark, that I liked very much, which was very interesting, was that because you would be building organs with the stem cells of the person, it would be very customized, and thus the rejection rate would be much lower. Exactly. That's exactly the hope. You minimize these problems that we have now with kind of transplants and even graphs where you're getting material from some donor that is not yourself about rejection. Right. Not to mention other ethical questions like not using embryos and so on. Exactly. Gentlemen, I am so sorry. We're coming to the end of this interview. I hope to have you again. Thank you so much for coming and for taking the time to be in the studio. Of course. And thank you for watching and from all of us here at Davis Media Access. Thank you and see you next time.