4D Printed Flowers To Pave Way For 4D Printed Human Tissues

Harvard’s 4D Printed Flowers to Pave Way for 4D Printed Human Tissues (+Animated GIF)

Michael Molitch-Hou | January 25, 2016

When I interviewed Voxel8 CEO Jennifer Lewis last year, she told me that she didn’t want me to conflate her research with her commercial work, namely the multi-material, electronics 3D printer she developed at Voxel8.  This meant that my questions regarding 4D printing and bioprinting would have to be reserved for a separate interview.  While the exact date for that interview is yet to be determined, her team at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering and the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences has continued to make progress, publishing a paper in Nature Materials outlining an experiment in “Biomimetic 4D printing”.

Source: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2075104-glowing-4d-printed-flowers-could-pave-way-for-replacement-organs/

<more at http://3dprintingindustry.com/2016/01/25/65379/; related links: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2075104-glowing-4d-printed-flowers-could-pave-way-for-replacement-organs/ (+Animated GIF) (Glowing 4D-printed flowers could pave way for replacement organs. January 25, 2016) and http://www.nature.com/nmat/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nmat4544.html (Biomimetic 4D printing. A. Sydney Gladman, Elisabetta A. Matsumoto, Ralph G. Nuzzo, L. Mahadevan and Jennifer A. Lewis. Nature Materials (2016) doi:10.1038/nmat4544. [Abstract: Shape-morphing systems can be found in many areas, including smart textiles1, autonomous robotics2, biomedical devices3, drug delivery4 and tissue engineering5. The natural analogues of such systems are exemplified by nastic plant motions, where a variety of organs such as tendrils, bracts, leaves and flowers respond to environmental stimuli (such as humidity, light or touch) by varying internal turgor, which leads to dynamic conformations governed by the tissue composition and microstructural anisotropy of cell walls6, 7, 8, 9, 10. Inspired by these botanical systems, we printed composite hydrogel architectures that are encoded with localized, anisotropic swelling behaviour controlled by the alignment of cellulose fibrils along prescribed four-dimensional printing pathways. When combined with a minimal theoretical framework that allows us to solve the inverse problem of designing the alignment patterns for prescribed target shapes, we can programmably fabricate plant-inspired architectures that change shape on immersion in water, yielding complex three-dimensional morphologies.])>