Platform designs organ-scale vascular trees for 3D bioprinting
Zachary Sexton and colleagues have developed a design platform that can quickly generate vascular trees, which can then be bioprinted and used for successful perfusion of living tissue constructs. The platform improves the design and production of complex vascular networks needed in the future for the creation of human tissues and organs. As the researchers note, the production of tissues with multiple cell types has recently improved. But just as a city needs a complete network of main roads, side streets, and alleys to direct traffic to the most remote corners, complex geometric tissues and organs also need a vascular network that reaches the tissue and ensures adequate perfusion – a design challenge that remains difficult for researchers. Sexton et al. used algorithmic advances to develop a synthetic toolkit that can generate organ-spanning tree networks within minutes (a 230-fold acceleration compared to current...

