One of the biggest challenges of growing organs in a laboratory is keeping them alive. They need nutrients, and the way organs get nutrients in nature is through veins. Professor Jennifer Lewis' group at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has developed a method of omnidirectional printing that allows microvascular networks to be brought to life. A needle deposits a polymer in a gel and the polymer is suspended in the gel. Then the gel can be hardened, and then the polymer can be heated to to its melting point (which is lower than that of the gel) and it can be vacuumed out. What remains is a 3D network of microchannels that mimic veins. This is the most advanced 3D microchannel fabrication that I've seen, but it requires many specialized materials and printers. Hopefully this process can be scaled up or a simpler process comes along.
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