At their annual Innovation Expo, Stevens Institute of Technology holds an Elevator Pitch competition where students have two minutes to pitch a new business or product to a panel of judges. Sarima Ali was chosen by her team to pitch their bio printing business Ducali 3D Printing Solutions and their proposed bio printer.
An elevator pitch is a presentation made by someone seeking venture capital investment(s) that is, well, short enough that it can be given during an elevator ride. The competition puts research students in front of a panel of judges who rate their pitch based on the quality of the pitch and the viability of the business plan or product.
Ali and her research partners’ proposed business would outline ways to bioprint your own human cells using their dual nozzle Ducali bio printer. This allows doctors the ability to test drugs on your own living cell tissue in vitro rather than relying on lengthy, cruel and often imprecise animal testing. She suggests that this process could remove testing trials of two to six years costing millions of dollars and an entire team of experts could be replaced with two technicians and a few hours or printing and a few weeks of testing.
The Ducali prototype has already 3D printed human bone cellular material and Ali claims that the process will work on any cellular tissue type. The printer and bioink packages are expected to cost about $200,000 and would sell to academic research labs and established corporate laboratories and research firms.
The very idea that doctors could be trained to customize highly effective drugs tailored specifically for an individual rather than less effective drugs intentionally made less effective in order to be safe enough for large groups of people without the worry of side effects is the stuff of science fiction. The “create a new drug in a matter of hours” plot is used by just about every sci fi television show at least once — dozens if you’re Star Trek — and thanks to 3D printing they might actually start becoming the stuff of reality.
This is just a short pitch from some research students and currently there doesn’t seem to be any official testing or published papers — that I could find — filed about the process that Ali is describing, but this is still a pretty spectacular idea. Granted, it is probably a decade or more off from being a reality, and the viability of in vitro testing needs to be established and the whole process would need to be regulated. However, the fact that it is already being researched is still pretty exciting.
