3D printing heart parts at 30,000 feet

If you live anywhere near the Gulf of Mexico, earlier this month, while you were sipping your coffee or surfing the web, a plane was zooming 30,000 ft (about 9,100 m) overhead, simulating weightlessness while a 3D bioprinter spit out heart and vascular structures created with human stem cells.

The project was a joint effort between several companies experimenting with bioprinting in zero gravity environments – an initiative that could lead to better and more widely available human organs.

The project was led by Techshot, a company that has been involved in creating equipment and experiments for space for years, and is able to commercially operate its equipment aboard the International Space Station (ISS) through a Space Act Agreement with NASA. The 3D printer used was developed by nScrypt and the bioinks came from Bioficial Organs Inc, a company that has sorted out a way to keep adult human stem cells alive and viable for transplantation even after being bioprinted.

But why bring bioprinting into a weightless environment in the first place? We asked Techshot's chief scientist, Eugene D. Boland, that very question and here's what he had to say.

The reason you want them thick is to hold the complex geometries the printer is trying to mimic from nature. All this changes in space. Without gravity, complex geometries can be built with bioinks that are optimized for biological activity rather than structural integrity. For the first time, we will be able to let the end tissue dictate the recipe rather than settle for good enough because it's strong enough.

The next step for the group is to create a smaller and robust 3D bioprinter, says Techshot, which it hopes to launch on a commercial space capsule in January. That will be followed by a version for the ISS in 2018 that can print thicker and more complex human tissue.