Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign used stem cells, a fibrin matrix, and 3D printed molds to engineer living biohybrid nerve tissue, which was used to develop 3D models of neural networks.
Gelson Pagan-Diaz-Diaz, first author of a paper published in PNAS last week, likens the produced tissue to a computer processing unit, which provided the basic principle to today's supercomputer. "Being able to form 3-dimensional tissue consisting of neurons can give us the ability to develop tissue models for drug screening or processing units for biological computers," Pagan-Diaz said.
In this study, the team developed neural tissue mimics that can form different shapes. Using the hydrogels and fibrin, the team made millimeter to centimeter scale structures that doesn't have rigid scaffolds and can be molded into a number of desired shapes.
"It's a bundle of hundreds to thousands of microns of cells that contains a lot of populations with a genetic makeup similar to in vivo tissues," Pagan-Diaz explained. "As we continue develop these bio-fabrication methods, we should be able to capture a lot of the phenomena that happens in vivo. Once we can prove that, we will be able to mimic the morphology that we see in the brain. Once we show that the tissue engineered outside the body is similar to the tissue in the body, then we can then fabricate them over and over again."