NASA has selected to fund a 3D bioprinting project at the Ames Research Center as one of the 12 projects for study under Phase I of the its Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) Program. The program, which “aims to turn science fiction into fact,” awards $100,000 to Phase I recipients to projects that are “revolutionary, yet technically substantiated,” according to the NIAC website.
Lynn Rothschild, the chief scientist of synthetic biology at the NASA Ames Research Center, said unlike what is being investigated in medtech now, it was Stanford PhD student Diana Gentry’s idea to push toward biocomposite traits.
“This is our seed money to really dream big,” Rothschild said.
“By printing 3D arrays of cells engineered to secrete the necessary materials, the abundant in situ resources of atmosphere and regolith become organic, inorganic or organic-inorganic composite materials,” according to the NIAC website. “Such materials include novel, biologically derived materials not previously possible to fabricate.”
Creating cells that lead to the creation of raw materials is how this project is unique among 3D bioprinting research.
Gentry and Ashley Micks, a graduate student in astronautics and aeronautics at Stanford, have been working at Ames on a proof of concept.
For the medical field, this could mean big savings in R&D and big innovation in medtech, and Rothschild said she would be happy to be contacted with ideas.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
“The thing that I’ve been pushing is an exquisite need for miniaturization,” Rothschild said. “If you push the field that direction this does have huge spin-offs for the medical field because you can take some of these technologies and deliver point-of-care services.”
“Pie in the sky stuff” includes applications such as the potential to print artificial biofilms to see how a drug responds, or printing miniature organs rather than putting animals through testing, Rothschild said. This could also have significant impact on implants and prove to be “much more rapid for diagnostics,” she said.
