Scientists at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering have moved one step closer to successfully printing three-dimensional, fully-functional tissue. The research, published early last week in the journal Advanced Materials, represents a significant leap toward a longer term goal of producing tissue that can undergo drug screening and substitute diseased or injured tissue.

Jennifer A. Lewis, SEAS professor and senior author of the study, said that the research differed from previous attempts at 3-D printing human tissue because they were able to successfully embed vascular networks into the printed tissues.

“Most of the efforts in tissue printing have been able to print cells and extracellular matrix, but they haven’t been able to include the vascular network, and that limits the complexity of the tissues you can print,” she said.

Building on previous work at the University of Illinois, Lewis and the team of researchers, including the study’s lead author David B. Kolesky, began working on the 3-D printing project last February. It took exactly 365 days before their research was released virally last week.

Lewis said she chose Harvard as the location for her research because the surrounding area served as an ideal backdrop for work in the biomedical field.

“Boston and Cambridge are a mecca for biomedical technology and a biomedical community, and doing the work here I thought would really be a good place to launch this effort,” she said.

Looking ahead, Lewis and her team plan on continuing research on 3-D printed tissues, beginning with further exploration of the development of the vascular network.

“What we want to do is use 3-D printing to create and direct some of the architecture in the tissue,” she said. “Then [we] let biology take over and create the finer capillaries and the things that you’d have in your blood vascular network in your body.”

After mastering tissue printing, Lewis said she hopes to use her research to tackle some of today’s most pressing scientific problems.

“Our first step is to explore what we can harness through 3D printing and what we can couple with biology to create the next generation of tissue architectures,” she said. “We want to explore their use for drug screening, and then ultimately, we want to be able to create more complex tissues that might even be able to be used for tissue regeneration and repair.”

—Staff writer Forrest K. Lewis can be reached at forrest.lewis@thecrimson.com.