At the Cutting Edge of 3D Bioprinting: WBC 2016 Round Up Part II

A guest blog post by RoosterBio Travel Award winner, Ian Kinstlinger.

Presenting on Open-source Selective Laser 

Sintering at WBC2016!

Since 1980, the international community of biomaterials scientists and engineers has convened every four years to discuss the cutting edge of biomaterials research. This year’s 10^th World Biomaterials Congress (WBC) brought us to lovely Montreal, Canada for a stimulating week of workshops, talks, posters, and social activities. I was honored to present my work from the Miller Lab at Rice University in both a podium talk and a poster session.

Our lab is broadly interested in developing strategies to construct vascular networks within engineered tissues. In my research, I have developed a platform technology which uses 3D printed carbohydrates as templates around which cells and biomaterials can be assembled. Dissolving the sugar away gives you an engineered tissue with perfusable channels; we believe that these constructs will be useful for understanding the mass transport requirements and emergent properties of engineered living tissue.

An overview of one method our lab has introduced to create 

embedded vascular networks in biomaterials.

I used my poster to spread the word about our lab’s Open-source Selective Laser Sintering technology and my podium talk to describe how we’ve adapted this system to perform laser-based 3D printing of carbohydrate materials. I was thrilled to have a large audience for my talk, followed by several insightful questions. My poster also received a steady stream of visitors, many of whom are involved in the open-source hardware community and were eager to talk about hardware hacking for biomaterials. That work was actually published earlier this year – and RoosterBio hMSCs were absolutely central. Their high quality and robust differentiation response made characterizing biocompatibility of materials quite straightforward.

A couple of key presentations stood out at WBC 2016:

Nano- and Micro-fabricated Hydrogels for Regenerative Engineering

• Dr. Ali Khademhosseini, Khademhosseini Lab, Harvard University
•  Dr. Khademhosseini gave an illuminating keynote on the many angles from which his lab is using bioprinting technologies to fabricate functional biological structures. He is also emerging as a leader in the field of integrated organ-on-chip drug screening platforms.

Injection of Dual-Crosslinking Hydrogels to Limit Infarct Induced Left Ventricular Remodeling

• Dr. Jason Burdick, Polymeric Biomaterials Laboratory, University of Pennsylvania
•  The Burdick lab has developed an innovative class of supramolecular biomaterials specifically targeted for 3D printing applications. The gels are shear-thinning due to their non-covalent crosslinks, and thus are amenable to extrusion printing. These materials are also useful as injectables for reducing left ventricular remodeling after heart attack.

Photoreversible patterning of hydrogel biomaterials with site-specifically-modified proteins

• Dr. Cole DeForest,  DeForest Research Group, University of Washington
•  Much like our lab is interested in patterning biomaterial architecture via 3D printing, the DeForest group is patterning functional proteins into materials through some very clever photochemistries. Their techniques give them spatiotemporal control over the incorporation of various full proteins into synthetic hydrogels.

It was tremendously exciting to see so many investigators working on 3D printing of biomaterials. I counted at least seven sessions devoted to the topic and was also impressed by the low-cost printers and inks now hitting the market, including RoosterBio’s new ready-to-print hMSC products. The diverse hardware and materials that have been introduced in the past few years are already transforming the field! It will be very interesting to see in the coming years whether these new techniques give way to novel insights into cell and tissue function in vitro, as many groups are currently promising.

It is also not yet clear whether the same groups who are mastering the materials and fabrication technology have the resources and expertise to analyze complex biological phenomena in their printed structures. A greater level of collaboration between biologists and materials/fabrication engineers may be necessary in the future to make progress in this area. I am going to end with shameless plug for my recent review article in Lab on a Chip which discusses 3D printing approaches for fabricating vascular networks and addresses the need for increased communication between biologists and materials scientists.

WBC 2016 was an incredible conference in which I got to present my work, learn about key advances in biomaterials, meet leaders in the field, and explore Montreal. Thanks so much to RoosterBio for providing the highest quality hMSCs and for their support of my work through a travel grant! 

An Open Letter to the Builders of the Cell-based BioEconomy

Dear Stem Cell Pioneer:

February marks the one year anniversary of RoosterBio shipping our first stem cell products to our valued customers, and I personally am very excited for the coming year ahead. We look forward to delivering even more high quality stem cells to people like you that are doing amazing things.

Looking forward into 2015 and beyond, I want to make sure we are staying true to our mission: to greatly increase the availability and accessibility of stem cell technology to researchers and product developers across the globe – and that we are committed to our vision of accelerating the pace of product development in the cellular therapy, bioprinting and tissue engineering markets.  I am hoping to focus our efforts to making sure that we are moving your discoveries and developments forward faster than anticipated.  This will not just be a win for our customers and RoosterBio, but for the entire Regenerative Medicine field.

In 2014 after launching our hMSCs in the unprecedented product format of 10 million cell vials to glowing reviews, we quickly implemented our Starter Kits and Working Cell Bank formats based on your feedback.  These new formats allow for accelerated testing, performance verification, and standardized small scale experimentation with reproducible outcomes.  We also initiated multiple collaborations with leaders in the tissue engineering and biofabrication fields – which has led to multiple conference posters, presentations, and soon to be submitted publications.

We also find ourselves at the precipice of a boom in biofabrication technologies, and we consider this the beginning of the Golden Age of Tissue Engineering.  I anticipate great progress will be made at an increasingly rapid pace.  Now that many of the tools required for bioprinting are becoming “democratized” (simpler, less expensive, more accessible) such as 3D BioPrinters, biomaterials, and primary cells – laboratories can get up and running in a matter of weeks with limited initial resources, something that would have taken months to years and extensive capital in the past.  We are at a special time, and the entire field will be accelerating forward at a rapid pace, making biofabrication truly an exponential medical technology.

2015 will truly be an exciting year for RoosterBio.  We will be participating in a Stem Cell Manufacturing Training Program, helping to organize several conferences on Cell Therapy BioProcessing and BioPrinting, exhibiting at multiple conferences, as well are contributing to initiatives such as the Georgia Tech Cell Manufacturing Consortium and the NIST Workshop on Strategies to Achieve Measurement Assurance for Cell Therapy Products.  The primary motivation behind these initiatives are to make sure that we are driving forward our vision and delivering on our mission.

None of this would be possible without the hard work and dedication of the entire RoosterBio team, as well as the support that we are getting from you, our valued customers.  Please continue to join us on our journey as we accelerate the development of the Cell-based BioEconomy.

All the best from Frederick, Maryland.


Jon A Rowley
Chief Executive & Technology Officer
RoosterBio Inc.

Democratizing Living Cellular Technology

@JennWebb recently wrote an article for the O’Reilly Radar titled Democratizing Technology and the Road to Empowerment.  She starts out the article with a nice summary of what it means to Democratize Technology.  Jenn writes “Advancements in technology are making what once was relegated only to highly educated scientists, engineers and developers accessible to — and affordable for — the mainstream.“  Now, the blog she writes for is focused on the intersection of Hardware and Software (or the “physical and digital worlds” is how they phrase it), while we at RoosterBio are imagining a World where biotechnology, specifically living cellular technologies, are simplified and cost-reduced to the point that you don’t have to be a PhD researcher in a well-funded laboratory to perform your own experiments or build novel things out of living cells. The concept of biology paralleling the advances of IT are well laid out elsewhere.

Today, it is much easier to incorporate living cells into your research than it was 20 years ago.  This is evidenced by the proliferation of Cell Biology capabilities in Engineering departments all over the world as Biomedical Engineering has turned into a formalized academic discipline.  When I was doing undergraduate research at the University of Michigan in the early 1990’s, it took months and several collaboration attempts before we could get living cells onto the biomaterial constructs we were making at the time.  Today, it is more commonplace to find the tools to marry the Worlds of Cell Biology and Engineering in the same laboratory.  Despite this, the total number of labs with such capabilities and expertise is still very small.

 We believe that the steps required to fully Democratize Cellular Technologies will be to: