A research team at Missouri University of Science and Technology has developed a light-driven 3D printing technique designed to streamline the creation of organs-on-a-chip—tiny tissue-like devices used for drug testing and medical research.
“The human body has about 37 trillion cells, and nearly every one must be close to a capillary to survive,” says Dr. Anthony Convertine, associate professor of materials science and engineering. “Re-creating those dense microcapillary networks is a major engineering challenge for tissue engineering, but our work offers a path toward overcoming that barrier.”
Streamlining Tissue Fabrication with Light-Activated, Self-Assembling Resins
Organs-on-a-chip are typically about the size of a baseball card, allowing scientists to study how human tissues respond to therapies without relying on animal or human trials. Traditionally, 3D printing these structures has involved building them point by point, similar to how an inkjet printer slowly maps individual dots on a page. Convertine explains that this process can be painstakingly slow and costly when reproducing the tiny, intricate networks that living tissues depend on.
“Point-by-point fabrication works, but it becomes slow and expensive when you try to create the intricate networks of tiny channels that living tissues rely on,” he says. “Our approach uses a light-curable, self-assembling resin that forms sacrificial structures. After printing, we dissolve those structures to leave clean, precise microchannels. It is faster, simpler and easier to scale.”
The technique also employs a one-pot formulation, blending the sacrificial resin with the material that will form the final microchannel system. This consolidation reduces processing steps and accelerates the prototyping and testing of tissue-chip designs in the lab.
Showcasing Innovative 3D Printing on Journal Covers
This research was featured as the cover article in a recent issue of Biomaterials Science, marking the third time since 2023 that Missouri S&T researchers have appeared on the cover of a Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) journal.
Earlier, a 2024 RSC Applied Polymers cover article highlighted how modifying the liquid resin with additional chain-transfer agent groups improves printing efficiency and produces stiffer, highly crosslinked materials. The 2023 Polymer Chemistry cover introduced a resin that employs polymerization-induced self-assembly, creating nanostructured networks during light-based printing and supporting tissue scaffold applications.
“It is incredibly gratifying to see these three related papers, each building on the last, reach this level of visibility,” Convertine says. “It shows how far our work has progressed and signals even larger advances ahead for 3D printed materials in tissue engineering.”
Expanding Organ-on-a-Chip Innovation with 3D Bioprinting
Besides Missouri S&T’s innovations, the field of 3D bioprinting is rapidly transforming drug testing and tissue engineering. Researchers at the Centre de recherche Azrieli du CHU Sainte-Justine, affiliated with the Université de Montréal, have developed a novel bioink tailored for 3D printing “heart-on-a-chip” devices. This composite material replicates the electrical, mechanical, and physiological characteristics of human heart tissue, enabling the fabrication of ring-shaped cardiac models with multiple cell types using high-throughput, automated printing in 12-well plates.
In 2017, the U.S. federal government awarded $24 million to a consortium led by the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine (WFIRM) to develop a “Body-on-a-Chip” system. Their latest research demonstrates successful integration of three vital organs—liver, heart, and lungs—into a single interconnected platform, signaling a major step toward more predictive, scalable, and humane models for drug discovery and personalized medicine.
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Featured image shows Dr. Anthony Convertine works on a PISA RAFT resin formulation for Digital Light Process (DLP) 3D printing of biomaterials for tissue engineering. Photo via Missouri University.
