Print and be damned!

The column that sits on a spot near St George's Hall and the Walker Gallery/World Museum in Liverpool supports the Duke of Wellington (well a statue of him!). It was nearly 200 years ago when he delivered his now famous challenge to a notorious publisher and blackmailer: "Publish and be damned!" So when I was working through ideas to talk over with George Rule (our resident 3D printer expert) about how we will be introducing 3D printing into the Liverpool Life Sciences UTC laboratory programme, I came across the US Biotech company Organovo. I had been thinking about printing molecular models of proteins, alpha helices, DNA duplexes and even printing lab equipment to facilitate and customize our experimental work. But I hadn't appreciated just how far patents in this area had come on over the last 5 years.   

I have been delivering talks on Biotechnology and Synthetic Biology to a range of groups from schools to University of the third age groups and I have been using the concept of 3D printing to explain the principles of protein synthesis and protein folding in cells (on the ribosome, shown right). The nice thing about biological 3D printing of proteins, is that often (but importantly not always), the sequence of amino acids, self-determines the final 3D structure of the protein; and in less than a second. So as biological 3D printers, ribosomes are pretty smart. However, I am not sure that the term "printing" is a quite right? Printing is defined by the OED as "marking a surface with text, a pattern, a design, or an image". In 3D printing, we are creating an object that is not attached to a surface. I wonder whether 3D publishing might be better, or perhaps molecular sculpting. Then I remembered my conversation with Professor Keith Ridgway at Sheffield's Advanced Manufacturing Centre, where he showed me how he "sprayed" powdered metals and bonded them in a furnace in order to construct 3D objects for jet engines: quite the opposite of traditional sculpting! So for now, printing it is!

Back to Organovo, who are pioneering the use of Bio-printing for the production of tissues for pre-clinical drug screening and ultimately for tissue implantation. So what do they mean by this term? They are taking cells and using their 3D printing technologies to generate an architecture, that mimics that found in tissues. This provides (in their view) a more relevant assay system for drug screening, and also provides a more sophisticated approach to tissue implanting during corrective surgery. Take a look at the videos on their web site and the Economist view (RHS). When I started thinking about the potential not only to make molecular models of bacteriophage, but also the possible printing of virions, I never imagined the technology was so advanced.