The European Union supports this project through a grant of €3.5 million that the researchers from the ‘Biomimetic systems for cell engineering’ group, headed by the Group Leader and UB Professor Elena Martínez, will use to provide the scientific community a new technology to fabricate ready-to-commercialize tridimensional cell culture substrates which could be useful to produce artificial organs in the near future.
Within this project, in the next three years IBEC researchers and scientists from other research centers in Europe will be focused on develop a top-down lithography method that will enable them adjust the spatial structure and the stiffness with an unprecedented resolution to create the same heterogeneous microstructures that cells find in natural tissues.
“Our goal is to design a bioprinting method able to solve the problems associated with the methods used nowadays that makes speed compatible with high resolution”, says Elena Martínez. According to the researcher, this new technology could help develop new 3D tissue models that could be used soon for in vitro applications such as clinical trials and, in the near future, for in vivo applications such as bioprinting of artificial skin provided with hair, which is something that tissue engineering has not been able to do to date.
The IBEC researchers will work in collaboration with experts from the Buchmann Institute for Molecular Life Sciences (BMLS) of the Goethe University Frankfurt (GUF), the Technion–Israel Institute of Technology, and the companies Mycronic and Cellendes, from Sweden and Germany, respectively
Visit the project’s website here
