A group of scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey have created very high resolution 3D printing technology. Conventional 3D printers can print elements up to 150 microns in size. The technology proposed at MIT is capable of printing an element with a thickness of 10 microns. Such accuracy is hardly needed for widespread use in 3D printing, but it is very useful for biomedical and medical research and even promises a breakthrough in these areas.
The fact is that today, relatively speaking, two-dimensional substrates are used for growing cell cultures. How and in what way cell colonies grow on such substrates is largely a matter of chance. Under such conditions, it is impossible to accurately control the shape and size of the overgrown colony. Another thing is a new method of manufacturing a substrate-substrate. Increasing the resolution of 3D printing to the scale of a cell opens the way to creating a regular cellular or porous structure, the shape of which will determine the size and appearance of a future cell colony with high accuracy. And shape control will largely set the properties of the cells and the colony as a whole. Yes, there are colonies! If you make a substrate in the form of a heart, then an organ will grow that looks like a heart, not a liver.
Let's make a reservation, while we are not talking about growing organs, although researchers note that stem cells live longer on substrates of micrometer cells than on a conventional substrate. At the moment, the behavior of cell colonies with different properties on a new three-dimensional substrate is being studied. Observations show that cell protein molecules create reliable focal adhesions at the point of adhesion to the substrate lattice and with each other, ensuring the growth of the colony in the volume of the substrate model.
So how did scientists manage to improve the resolution of 3D printing? As reported in a scientific article in the publication Microsystems and Nanoengineering, the technology of melting with electro-exposure (melt electrowriting) helped to increase the resolution. In practice, a strong electromagnetic field was applied between the print head of a 3D printer and the substrate for printing a model, which helped to crush and in a certain way direct the molten material that was beating from the nozzles of the print head. Alas, no other details have been released.
Source: 3dnews.ru