Words

Problem

As can be seen, heart disease and cancer are by far the top killers within the United States. Heart disease typically culminates in a myocardial infarction (MI), commonly known as a heart attack. During an MI, the patient's heart malfunctions and can no longer receive oxygenated blood from the lungs. This causes the heart's muscle cells, cardiomyocytes, to die. This is especially severe because cardiomyocytes don't replicate on their own. When the heart can no longer function, this is called heart failure.

Technology

Current Treatments

Currently, patients who suffer from heart failure either have their hearts replaced by a donor heart, supplemented with an artifical/mechanical heart, or healed through stem cell therapy. Each of these methods are deeply flawed, though. In order to implant a donor heart, the patient needs to wait until one is available. There also is a risk that the patient’s body rejects the heart entirely. Artifical hearts require the patient to carry a power source with them, can easily get infected, and don’t actually repair the heart’s damage. Stem cell therapy actually repairs the heart and avoids the risk of rejection, but actual grafting rates of stem cells onto the heart is exceptionally poor.

Our Innovation

In order to restore normal heart functions to a the patient post-MI, we propose this future technology: a 3D bioprinter capable of creating extracellular matrixes (ECM). Organs are made out of cells and an ECM. ECM’s are composed of proteins, sugars, and other chemicals that tell cells how to properly differentiate and form certain organs. If you have an ECM and graft the appropriate stem cells with the appropriate growth factors, it should form an organ that the patients body won’t reject. The ECMs printed will then be grafted with stem cells that differentiate into the appropriate cell type.

This will effectively allow us to create any fully functional, transplantable organs.


An LVAD, a type of artifical heart.

Dr.Rohan Parikh,M.D at Texas Heart Institute

"To give you a perspective, there are a 150,000 patients waiting to receive an organ transplant at any time, but only 30% of patients receive one...to have a fully bio-printed 3D organ would be revolutionary."

Solution

How It Works

The video to the left features our prototype and quotes from our mentor, Rohan Parikh, about our technologies potential impact.

The filaments mentioned in the video are a dissolvable plastic and a bioink. The bioink, a mixture of stem cells, growth factors, sugars, proteins, and whatever else is needed, creates the ECM itself, while the plastic provides a structure for cells to form a matrix upon. Little is currently understood, however, about the formation of the ECM both chemically and physically, so further research is needed to develop a bioink.

In addition to the features mentioned in the video, the printer also needs to have some way to store the ECM as a file to print it out. In order to do this, we propose that we instead teach the machine how to print an ECM through machine learning. This would involve converting an ECM into a 3-Dimensional matrix, and having each value represent some physical aspect. However, further research is needed to figure out what each value represents.