Bowman Endowed Professor Jason Burdick of the BioFrontiers Institute and the Department of Chemical & Biological Engineering has been .

"NAM membership reflects the height of professional achievement and commitment to service," and Jason was chosen "for innovative biomaterials and biofabrication techniques and their application as in vitro models of biological and disease processes, as well as therapies for the repair and regeneration of injured musculoskeletal and cardiovascular tissues."

Jason's impactful work has also resulted in him being named among the Top 1% of Highly Cited Researchers by Clarivate Analytics/Web of Science and founding multiple companies to translate his lab's work into biomedical solutions.

The NAM Class of 2024 includes 100 new members elected by current members, bringing total membership to over 2400.

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In the quest to develop life-like materials to replace and repair human body parts, scientists face a formidable challenge: Real tissues are often both strong and stretchable and vary in shape and size.

A CU Â鶹ӰԺ-led team, in collaboration with researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, has taken a critical step toward cracking that code. They’ve developed a new way to 3D print material that is at once elastic enough to withstand a heart’s persistent beating, tough enough to endure the crushing load placed on joints, and easily shapable to fit a patient’s unique defects.

Better yet, it sticks easily to wet tissue.

Their breakthrough, described in the Aug. 2 edition , helps pave the way toward a new generation of biomaterials, from internal bandages that deliver drugs directly to the heart to cartilage patches and needle-free sutures.

“Cardiac and cartilage tissues are similar in that they have very limited capacity to repair themselves. When they’re damaged, there is no turning back,â€� said senior author Jason Burdick, a professor of chemical and biological engineering at CU Â鶹ӰԺ’s BioFrontiers Institute. “By developing new, more resilient materials to enhance that repair process, we can have a big impact on patients.â€�

Worm ‘blobs’ as inspiration

Historically, biomedical devices have been created via molding or casting, techniques which work well for mass production of identical implants but aren’t practical when it comes to personalizing those implants for specific patients. In recent years, 3D printing has opened a world of new possibilities for medical applications by allowing researchers to make materials in many shapes and structures.

Unlike typical printers, which simply place ink on paper, 3D printers deposit layer after layer of plastics, metals or even living cells to create multidimensional objects.

One specific material, known as a hydrogel (the stuff that contact lenses are made of), has been a favorite prospect for fabricating artificial tissues, organs and implants.

Jason Burdick in his lab at the BioFrontiers Institute with the 3D Printer. 

This 3D printed material is at once strong, expandable, moldable and sticky.

Laboratory tests show this 3D printed material molds and sticks to organs. Pictured is a porcine heart.

But getting these from the lab to the clinic has been tough because traditional 3D-printed hydrogels tend to either break when stretched, crack under pressure or are too stiff to mold around tissues.

“Imagine if you had a rigid plastic adhered to your heart. It wouldn’t deform as your heart beats,� said Burdick. “It would just fracture.�

To achieve both strength and elasticity within 3D printed hydrogels, Burdick and his colleagues took a cue from worms, which repeatedly tangle and untangle themselves around one another in three-dimensional “worm blobs� that have both solid and liquid-like properties. Previous research has shown that incorporating similarly intertwined chains of molecules, known as “entanglements,� can make them tougher.

Their new printing method, known as CLEAR (for Continuous-curing after Light Exposure Aided by Redox initiation), follows a series of steps to entangle long molecules inside 3D-printed materials much like those intertwined worms.

When the team stretched and weight-loaded those materials in the lab (one researcher even ran over a sample with her bike) they found them to be exponentially tougher than materials printed with a standard method of 3D printing known as Digital Light Processing (DLP). Better yet: They also conformed and stuck to animal tissues and organs.

“We can now 3D print adhesive materials that are strong enough to mechanically support tissue,� said co-first author Matt Davidson, a research associate in the Burdick Lab. “We have never been able to do that before.�

Revolutionizing care

Burdick imagines a day when such 3D-printed materials could be used to repair defects in hearts, deliver tissue-regenerating drugs directly to organs or cartilage, restrain bulging discs or even stitch people up in the operating room without inflicting tissue damage like a needle and suture can.

His lab has filed for a provisional patent and plans to launch more studies soon to better understand how tissues react to the presence of such materials.

But the team stresses that their new method could have impacts far beyond medicine—in research and manufacturing too. For instance, their method eliminates the need for additional energy to cure, or harden, parts, making the 3D printing process more environmentally friendly.

“This is a simple 3D processing method that people could ultimately use in their own academic labs as well as in industry to improve the mechanical properties of materials for a wide variety of applications,� said first author Abhishek Dhand, a researcher in the Burdick Lab and doctoral candidate in the Department of Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania. “It solves a big problem for 3D printing.�

Other co-authors on the paper include Hannah Zlotnick, a postdoctoral researcher in the Burdick Lab, and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) scientists Thomas Kolibaba and Jason Killgore.

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Professor Stephanie Bryant 

Professor Jason Burdick 

Photo caption: Morgan Riffe (left), a PhD candidate in Materials Science & Engineering, looks on while Meg Cooke, PhD, research associate in the BioFrontiers Institute, explains the 3D printing process to fabricate biomaterial scaffolds. 

The Materials Science and Engineering Program at the Â鶹ӰԺ received a $1M grant to fund interdisciplinary doctoral research training in biofarication.

The National Institutes of Health T32 award will support this rapidly developing field, which enables precise and effective ways to study and treat various medical conditions, such as growing new organs for transplants or repairing damaged tissues.

The grant, along with support from CU Â鶹ӰԺ’s College of Engineering and Applied Science, Research & Innovation Office (RIO), the Graduate School and various departments and programs, will support five new trainees each year for a period of two years each, over the next five years. Professors Jason Burdick and Stephanie Bryant with the Materials Science and Engineering Program, Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering and the BioFrontiers Institute are the principal investigators.

“Biofabrication is an emerging field with growing advances each year,� Burdick said. “It’s important to train students in this field to not only advance their own dissertation research, but also to train a future workforce that will help turn biofabrication methods into new products and clinical therapies.�

Biofabrication uses advanced 3D processing techniques, allowing engineers to design and build materials that serve as tools in medical research and treatments. Examples of these materials include: scaffolds that support the growth and development of new tissues, microparticles used for targeted drug delivery, and microfluidic platforms, which are small-scale devices that manipulate tiny amounts of fluids for research and diagnostic purposes.

Representative biofabrication technologies include 3D printing, the use of electrospinning to create fine fibers similar to natural tissues and photopatterning to develop detailed and complex designs.

The ability to shape material structures at such a detailed level can be used to grow new tissues for transplants or repair damaged organs, develop materials that can help the body heal itself by promoting the growth of healthy cells, design microparticles that can deliver medication directly to targeted areas in the body, provide more accurate environments for growing cells in the lab, and create more realistic models of human tissues for research and testing to reduce the need for animal models.

At CU Â鶹ӰԺ, students applying to the program will be starting their second year of PhD training in one of the following five engineering disciplines—biological engineering, biomedical engineering, chemical engineering, materials science and engineering, and mechanical engineering. Those accepted to the training program will be supervised and mentored by the T32 preceptors based in these engineering departments and programs and co-mentored by clinical collaborators to provide a biomedical and clinical focus to the work.

“This training program builds upon the excellence in biofabrication that we have in engineering at CU Â鶹ӰԺ,â€� Bryant said. “It offers an exciting new opportunity for our graduate students to gain a deeper understanding of biofabrication, complementing the core knowledge they are developing in their PhD program.â€�

As part of the training program, a monthly seminar series will be developed for students and postdocs across biofabrication groups to share their work within the community. Students will also receive a certificate in biofabrication. The group will create a website for the training program and include biofabrication resources to the broader community. 

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