Notre Dame Researchers Develop Method for 3D Printing Blood Capillary Networks

Researchers at the University of Notre Dame have successfully 3D printed blood capillary networks using a surprising technique. Before exploring their method, it’s worth understanding why 3D printing blood capillary networks matters in the first place. In the United States alone, over 100,000 people are waiting for organ transplants, and donor organs remain in short supply. If we could 3D print organs out of a patient’s own cells, it could not only address the shortage, but potentially eliminate the risk of the body rejecting the organ altogether.

That’s why researchers have been working for decades to 3D print organs. One central challenge, however, is replicating the scale and complexity of the body’s vascular networks, especially capillaries. A blood capillary network is an interlacing web of the body’s smallest blood vessels. These microscopic tubes deliver oxygen and nutrients to cells and remove waste products, making them a necessary component of any bioprinted tissue model.

(Left) Capillaries visualized with fluorescent imaging, appeared on the cover of Nature Chemical Engineering. (Right) Yanliang Zhang and Yuxuan Liao, doctoral student and lead author of the study. (Photo by Wes Evard / Notre Dame College of Engineering)

“Printing blood vessels that mimic natural living systems is very difficult since the vessels vary in size,” said Yanliang Zhang, the Advanced Materials and Manufacturing Collegiate Professor in the Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering. “Getting the smallest vessels right, without losing scalability and structural integrity, has remained one of the greatest challenges to current state-of-the-art bioprinting.”