3DEndoFab: 3D Printing Biological Tissues Inside the Human Body

Imagine if one day we could print biological tissue directly inside the human body. It sounds crazy, but perhaps it is not as futuristic as it seems. Dr. Andrea Toulouse of the Institute of Applied Optics at the University of Stuttgart has just received €1.8 million in funding from the Carl Zeiss Foundation as part of the CZS Nexus program to accelerate her research on this issue. She will set up a research group, called 3DEndoFab, to design a micro 3D printer that could directly create tissue inside the body. It’s easy to imagine all the constraints that this micro-machine may represent, but this topic will undoubtedly have a considerable impact on the medical sector.

Printing skin, cartilage, tissue, or other cellular structures is now possible, and applications are rapidly multiplying. However, there are currently no solutions that allow printing directly inside the body, thereby eliminating all the challenges associated with implanting the printed structure. This is often the problem. This is what Dr. Andrea Toulouse hopes to solve. She is using the principle of endoscopy to design a very fine 3D printer that could be inserted into our bodies and create tissue directly on site so that it can perform its full function.

Andrea Toulouse and her team are conducting research into high-resolution 3D printing using light-based processes (photo credit: University of Stuttgart / Uli Regenscheit)

The project is called “3D Endoscopic Microfabrication” or 3DEndoFab. Andrea Toulouse explains: “Our group aims to develop a 3D-printed micro-optic, no larger than a grain of salt, that can be positioned on the tip of a glass fiber. There, it will shape light in such a way that even complex tissue structures can be printed in 3D with micrometer resolution, i.e., on the scale of human cells,”