Gastric wall injuries are a common digestive tract problem, often requiring drug therapy or invasive surgery. Bioprinting, a way of delivering new cells directly to the wound site to repair tissue, offers a potential treatment.

Xu Tao, Professor from Tsinghua’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, and his team recently put forward a new concept of "in situ in vivo bioprinting" and designed a microbot that enters the body via an endoscope to carry out tissue repair.

They tested the microbot and the delivery system with a biological model of a human stomach and an endoscope to mimic the insertion and bioprinting operation. They also carried out a bioprinting test in a cell culture dish to test how effective the device was at bioprinting viable cells and repairing wounds.

The tests showed that printed cells remained at high viability and steady proliferation, which indicated good biological function of the cells in the printed tissue.

Combing research on biological manufacturing, 3D printing and mechanics, the research verified the feasibility of this concept for treatment for gastric wall injuries and offered a potential application for a variety of wound treatments inside the body without the need for invasive surgery.

The research was published in the journal Biofabrication.

Source: Guo Ying, Xinhuanet.com

Editors: Kevin Liang, Lin Lu, John Olbrich