The International Space Station (ISS) is not a place where astronauts simply go gallivanting for a few months. It is an active lab, pushing the envelope of what we know in many scientific and technical fields. Now, astronauts on the ISS have received a new cargo of science experiments to work on. Among them is one that aims to build human tissues in space.
The experiment is called the BioFabrication Facility (BFF) and was taken to the ISS by a SpaceX rocket as part of their latest Cargo Resupply Service. It was developed collaboratively by Techshot and nScrypt. The machine is a 3D printer but instead of printing plastic, it will be printing human tissue, specifically a cardiac patch, tissue designed to heal a damaged heart.
Many scientists have been working on the growth of organs in the lab, and while amazing achievements have been reached in the last decade, there are still huge challenges when it comes to growing full organs. In particular, researchers have struggled to construct the more minute structures found inside organs. Organs also need to be built on scaffolds to maintain their shape, but so far there’s no scaffold that can be removed without harming the newly built organ.
This is where the ISS might have a unique advantage. The space station is in constant free fall around Earth, so the environment experiences microgravity. This means it is possible that tissue could grow there without the need for scaffolding. If this is the case, it might open up a new avenue to how we might grow organs in the future.
The system will be installed by the astronauts but will be controlled from Earth. The tissues will be printed inside cell-culturing bioreactor cassettes and then put into a different piece of tech where they will continue to incubate and be studied. Researchers expect this phase to last several months before the material is sent back to Earth.
“The concept of developing tissue or an organ in space with a 3D bioprinter has been with us for years,” Techshot President and CEO John Vellinger said in a statement. “From the technological and biological perspectives, making it real has been a painstaking process of experiments and testing. To see this coming together is an amazing thing for the team, as well as for all of medical science.”
Obviously, the ability to 3D print organs would have huge implications. It would help to reduce the organ donor shortage and make donation safer, as organs would be made with the patient’s own stem cells. Achieving this feat is still far into the future, but BFF might provide an important clue to how to get there faster.
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