3D Bioprinting to Engineer Human Tissue: Wyss Institute's David Kolesky at Biotech Week Boston

The medical 3D printing market is expected to reach $983.2 million by the year 2020. What is the difference between medical and other 3D printing? Well to explain very simply, I will use a quote from Hod Lipson from ASME.org (Lipson is the author of  Fabricated: The New World of 3D Printing): “Unlike traditional 3D printing of plastics and metal where after you finish printing you have your part, with bioprinting it’s just the beginning. Even after you finish printing there is a long road ahead. You have to incubate the part, simulate its environment – it’s much more complicated.”

This month I was lucky enough to hear David Kolesky from Harvard University’s Wyss Institute discuss his team’s latest work on 3D bioprinting. The idea that we are beginning to be able to print human tissue is mind-blowing, and to hear details from someone in the forefront of this work was awe-inspiring.

Human Tissue Engineering: Challenges and Solutions
David Kolesky is part of a team at Jennifer Lewis' Research Group at the Harvard John A. Paulson School for Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University who is working on engineering human tissue. In his talk at Biotech Week Boston on October 6, Kolesky focused on the team's work with engineering kidney tissue in particular. He described his team’s focus and some of their challenges: “(A human) kidney has a million nephrons, within the nephron we’re focused on the proximal tubule” and “(human) tissue is extremely difficult to mimic, because (of its) hierarchical structures that have a composite nature.” (You can see the tubule below, courtesy Wyss Institute.)

Stem-Cell Laden ‘Ink’ Becomes Living Tissue
Kolesky told the story of exactly how he was using 3D printing, specifically “bioprinting” to solve the challenges of vascularization. To someone not well versed in the latest discoveries it was fairly astounding – especially when he elucidated the use of “stem-cell laden ‘ink’ to build fully vascularized human tissue”. The materials they’re using are almost as fascinating at the engineered tissue: a hydrogel, which becomes “liquid when cooled” is the substance Kolesky and the Wyss Institute is using to make the bioprinting happen. With the methods he’s using, they are able to “keep these vascular networks perfusable for up to 45 days”. Their 3D printed proximal tubules actually contain living human cells and mimic many biological functions of nephrons.

How do they do that? Once the tubules are printed, they pump living kidney cells into them. After several days in the tubules the cells begin to function like the ones in our bodies. Cells in the tubules are “trained” by the chemistry of their environment to become and behave exactly like native kidney cells.

Researchers Can Now Study Real-Time Damage To Tubules
There are 60,000 people on a national waiting list for kidneys, and the CDC says that 1 in 10 American adults, more than 20 million people, have some level of chronic kidney disease. There is an urgent need for science to advance this research. The Wyss Institute is not only at the forefront of bringing us closer being able to engineer human kidneys in the future; with the current research researchers will actually be able to induce damage on these bioengineered tubules as if they were the real thing to study effects of drugs or toxins.

We Want a Synergistic Relationship with Biology
Kolesky closed his talk with the quote: ”We want a synergistic relationship with biology.” In fact Wyss Institute's Mission Statement is: "The Wyss Institute seeks to transform engineering, medicine and the environment by creating new materials and devices using Nature’s design principles".

Their team's paper:”Bioprinting of 3D Convoluted Renal Proximal Tubules on Perfusable Chips” was published in Nature Scientific Reports several days after Biotech Week Boston and gives more detail on Kolesky’s research. You can read the paper here.

Interested in hearing more about innovations in the intersection of bioengineering and medicine? Download our report here. And don't forget to follow Biotech Week Boston on Twitter for news on innovation in biotech and medicine. Each year passionate scientists and innovators converge on Boston to share ground breaking data, research and ideas - don't miss our next event in September 2017!

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Rising from the Historical Grave

By: Frank Corden is the Senior Director of Growth Services for New England Controls

Well it’s almost Halloween.  So a story about data rising from the dead seemed an appropriate theme.  Let’s start with a little background.

Data historians are a staple of the manufacturing control infrastructure at most, if not all, biotech manufacturing facilities.  Whether provided as a component of the distributed control system (DCS) offered by Honeywell, Siemens, Emerson, or other DCS suppliers, or integrated as standalone software, such as offered by AspenTech, the historian is the go-to data source for the time-sequenced record of what has occurred on the manufacturing floor.  When combined with an enterprise- or site-wide historian such as OSISoft’s PI Historian, the manufacturing data, the building control system data, and data from other selected sources can be combined in a single repository.  Although these historians may be used in batch reporting, as well as for conducting investigations of process deviations, much of the data remains buried, unused, and unloved.  As one of my colleagues put it, “they’re just data graveyards.”

Biotech manufacturers actively have been expanding their enterprise historians and adding capabilities using various data analytics software packages, including Biovia Discoverant, Dell Statistica, and Bio-G, to name a few.  These systems enable manufacturers to integrate data sets not only from one or more data historians, but also from the Laboratory Information Management Systems (LIMS), the Enterprise Resource and Planning systems (ERP), the Learning Management Systems (LMS), the Product Lifecycle Management systems (PLM) and others.  The objectives of the analytics system installation vary from company to company but there are common themes.  These software systems enable more efficient and timely creation of reports, charts, and graphs to support:  1) routine generation of control charts and other process views, 2) operational excellence initiatives including but not limited to overall equipment effectiveness ( OEE), 3) investigations of process events, and 4) process development / tech transfer. In a few instances, the systems even come full circle with Quality by Design (QbD).

In the process development (PD) labs, the environment and the data challenge is very different from manufacturing.  In any PD lab you can find a range of equipment from various manufacturers, all of which have control systems and collect data, but not many of these systems communicate with each other or to a central data repository.  So in PD, the data lies buried in these islands.

Although the PD labs are comfortable with data analytics and use the tools routinely, the challenge lies in aggregating the data to make it available to them and extracting the data from these islands of automation. 

To address this disparate data nightmare, one PD lab, has embarked on an ambitious program to integrate all their lab scale units to an OSI PI historian.  By doing so, much more of the data is readily accessible without the manual transcription, creation, and distribution of spreadsheets that we often see in laboratories.  One goal of the program is to enable the lab to generate their routine data analyses with greater automation and free their scientists to spend more time doing the experimental and analytics work they are trained for.  By combining automated data aggregation with a historian and applying the newest analytics tools that also automate routine data analyses, we can liberate the data and bring to life the knowledge that is trapped within it.  And that is a happy ending to our Halloween story.

Happy Halloween!

About the Author: Frank Corden is the Senior Director of Growth Services for New England Controls, the leading supplier of process automation equipment and related services in the New England region. Frank has 20 years of experience in the Life Sciences industry.  He has served as a Director for Decision Management International, PerkinElmer, and Emerson Process Management in operational, research and development as well as quality leadership roles. In his current position, Frank is responsible for managing an expanding team of engineers and technicians that deliver software products and services to industrial and life science customers throughout New England. 

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