3D Printing Incubator – Using 3D Printing To Print a Trachea

MakerBot Stories | Feinstein Institute for Medical Research from MakerBot on Vimeo.

Printing a trachea is much like printing any object, although it requires a bit more patience. MakerBot printers use a technique called extrusion printing, which creates objects out of successive thin layers of molten plastic that bind together as the printed object cools. Printing a tracheal replacement requires alternating layers of plastic and bio-ink. That means waiting for each layer of plastic to cool so its heat doesn’t kill the living cells. Goldstein says the plastic models take about five minutes to print but the replacement trachea itself takes several hours.
Once the printer has finished the final structure, the trachea-to-be is transferred into a modified incubator, where the cells continue to grow around the plastic. The whole structure would then be inserted by a surgeon into a patient. Goldstein took an old incubator that the institute was going to decommission and is adapting it to grow his tracheae. He 3D-printed new parts—gears, screws, fittings—using models he found on MakerBot’s 3D model repository, the Thingiverse, to make the incubator, as he said, more like a rotisserie oven on the inside, so the cells are warmed evenly. “It looks like a Game Boy now,” Goldstein said.