3D Printed Heart Can Beat With New Fiber-Infused Ink

Heart disease is one of the leading causes of death worldwide. It is so widespread that according to the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), one person dies every 33 seconds in the United States from cardiovascular disease with it being responsible for 1 in 5 deaths, about 695,000 people, in 2021. As such, research into treatment is imperative. Thankfully, Harvard scientists have recently had a breakthrough thanks to bioprinting. By using a special fiber-infused ink, they claim that they are able to 3D printed a functional heart ventricle that can mimic the beating of a human heart.

This is not the first time that bioprinting has been used in efforts to create organs. Currently, there is a shortage of organ donations and while according to the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network, 42,000+ transplants occurred in 2022 alone, at least 17 people die each day while waiting for an organ transplant. To bridge this gap, bioprinting, or the act of using real cells to print living parts, has been put forth as a serious contender. However, though research continues, viability has been difficult to establish. By enabling the creation of tissue that can actually beat, this would bring us one step closer to not just being able to create 3D printed tissues for research but actually print entire organs.

Suji Choi, research associate at SEAS and first author on the paper, explains “People have been trying to replicate organ structures and functions to test drug safety and efficacy as a way of predicting what might happen in the clinical setting. FIG ink is capable of flowing through the printing nozzle but, once the structure is printed, it maintains its 3D shape. Because of those properties, I found it’s possible to print a ventricle-like structure and other complex 3D shapes without using extra support materials or scaffolds.”