Category: News category

Last 11 of February, Nuria Torras, B-BRIGHTER researcher at the Institute of Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC), went to a school near Barcelona to explain her research and show that women can also be excellent scientists!

Every year since 2015, on the 11 of February we celebrate the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, declared by the United Nations. The main objective of this worldwide event is to eradicate gender stereotypes and established prejudices that have hindered the involvement of girls and women in science. Globally, this day stands as an engagement to offering comprehensive and unbiased opportunities for women and girls within the scientific domain. The various activities put forth are geared towards fostering the empowerment of women and girls, fostering their engagement in scientific pursuits, and advancing the cause of gender parity.

In this context, Nuria Torras, researcher at the Biomimetic systems for cell engineering group from Elena Martinez at IBEC in Barcelona, took part in the 8^th International Day of Women and Girls in Science. She participated in the annual event 100tifiques, organized by the Catalan Foundation for Research and Innovation (FCRI) and the Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology (BIST), an initiative that aims to bring science closer to schools and claim the female scientific talent.

Nuria gave a talk to about 30 students (11 years-old) from the Creu Alta School at Sabadell, a city near Barcelona. She explained a little bit the work done in B-Brighter project and talked about the principles of 3D printing, the biological models, the material and cell types they use in the laboratory. Among the questions students asked Nuria, one was very original: “Can humans eat what you use to feed the cells in the laboratory?” Who knows… Maybe in the future this will arrive!

To conclude her participation, Nuria explained her trajectory to become a scientist and make them realize that a scientist is an ordinary person who also has a family, hobbies… and can also be a women! Students were very interested and motivated and took the opportunity to exchange with Nuria not only about science but also about being a female scientist.

The Swedish online magazine Elektroniktidningen recently published an article about the B-BRIGHTER project.

“It takes no more than ten minutes to produce a 10x10x1 millimetre piece of tissue from a hydrogel mixed with stem cells and MYCRONIC’s laser system drawing the structure. The next phase of the EU B-BRIGHTER project will be to bring the technology one step closer to a commercial product”. This is how the article about the B-BRIGHTER innovative 3D bioprint technology published the 12^th of January on “Elektroniktidningen” begins. This online magazine provides the Swedish electronics industry with qualified news, analyses, and in-depth technical articles. They also have a website in Finland.

The article highlights the advantages of this new technology to produce bioprinted human tissues over what exists nowadays: “Creating living tissues is a relatively new area where capillary dispensing has been used to build layer after layer from the bone upwards. With laser technology it is possible to do the opposite and build freely in space in the hydrogel. It is also much faster, meaning that a higher proportion of cells are still alive when the tissue is complete”.

In B-BRIGHTER technology, an acousto-optic technique is a key element. It is used to control the light from the laser and consists of two parts, one that affects the intensity of the light and one that affects the direction. “Starting with a 3D cad of the object to be manufactured, it is converted into voxels, each of which has a position and an intensity. It is possible to create any pattern, says Robert Eklund at MYCRONIC.

The initial project (named BRIGHTER) was funded with almost 3 million € by the EU, while the continuation, the B-BRIGHTER project, has received more that 1,5 million € for creating a product that can manufacture tissues and bring it closer to the market. In the actual phase, researchers are trying to make different types of tissues including skin, cornea and intestine, all of which have their characteristic shapes.

The article also emphasizes that the system will not only produce tissues, but by using a separate laser it will also be possible to see what is happening in real time.

You can read the original article in this link.

For two years, Gustaf Mårtensson, coordinator of B-BRIGHTER project at MYCRONIC, will spend part of his time working at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm studying bioprinting applications and technology development.

The Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research (Stiftelsen för Strategisk Forskning, SSF) recently published the list with the nine projects that will be granted in the last call of the Strategic Mobility Program, and B-BRIGHTER is one of them! Under the title ‘Novel light-based bioprinting strategies’, the project will receive about 90K euros for two years to allow Gustaf from MYCRONIC to work in close collaboration with researchers at SciLifeLab at the Royal Institute of Technology, KTH (school of Chemistry, Biotechnology and Health). The main objective is to identify and better understand use cases for B-BRIGHTER bioprinter.

The SSF is an autonomous and unaffiliated entity in the public research funding system which economically supports research in the fields of science, technology, and medicine. Its mission is to foster the growth of robust research ecosystems that attain the highest global standards, supporting the development of the Swedish industrial and academic and fostering its competitiveness. In this context, the Strategic Mobility Program increases knowledge transfer and cross-fertilization between sectors and also gives researchers the opportunity to develop by changing workplace from academia/research institute to business/authority/hospital, or vice versa.

Last Wednesday took place at Mycronic, in Sweden, the kick-off meeting of the B-BRIGHTER project. Members of all partner institutions participated to lay the first stone of this exciting bioprinting project.

B-BRIGHTER (Better bioprinting by light sheet lithography: engineering complex tissues with high resolution at high speed) project is a EIC Transition project funded by the EU and coordinated by Dr. Gustaf Märtensson and his team at Mycronic, a global supplier of high precision production of electronics technology and equipment. B-BRIGHTER is the natural continuation of the EU project BRIGHTER, ended last December, and it aims to bring the new bioprinting technology closer to the market, being naturally more oriented to the industry and investors.

Project members meet last 19^th of October in Täby, Sweden, to discuss about their role and responsibilities in the project, and about its functioning, including the main production and research lines. They also defined the work plan for the following months and the near future actions inside each work package.

B-BRIGHTER at a glance

B-BRIGHTER will develop a novel bioprinting technology able to produce engineered tissues with high spatial resolution at high printing speed using an original top-down lithography approach. The project has the objective of establishing a business case for the light-based bioprinter.

In contrast with current bottom up, layer-by-layer bioprinting methods, B-BRIGHTER aims at ultrahigh-speed digital light-sheet illumination strategy to selectively photo-crosslink cell-laden hydrogels mimicking specific tissues, in confined voxels and produce three-dimensional complex geometries. For this, researchers will develop a top-down lithography method that will enable adjusting the spatial structure and the stiffness with an unprecedented resolution to create the same heterogeneous microstructures that cells find in natural tissues.

As a proof-of-concept, researchers will engineer three complex barrier tissues models: skin, cornea and gut. B-BRIGHTER technology will enable the bioprinting of key anatomical microfeatures of tissue such as invaginations, evaginations or wavy morphologies. It will also incorporate hollow vascular structures while maintaining tissue mechanical integrity without the need of additional sacrificial material

The B-BRIGHTER consortium (the same as in BRIGHTER) is composed by: Mycronic, as coordinator; the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC); the Buchmann Institute for Molecular Life Sciences (BMLS) of the Goethe University Frankfurt (GUF); the Technion–Israel Institute of Technology and the company Cellendes.