Researchers at the Armed Forces Institute for Regenerative Medicine's Wake Forest lab have successfully modified an inkjet printer to dispense living tissue directly to wounds, accelerating healing for areas of skin loss such as in burns. A burn wound is not flat, there are deeper wounds as well as shallow wounds which need to be filled in with different skin cells known as fibroblasts and keratinocytes. A camera scans the patient's body, using a laser to create a 3D map of the wound. The computer then tells the printer where to print, and which cell to use. In an inkjet printer, the bubble of ink formed is roughly the same size as a cell, allowing single cell precision.
A fibroblast is a type of cell that synthesizes the extracellular matrix and collagen, the structural framework (stroma) for animal tissues, and plays a critical role in wound healing. Fibroblasts are the most common cells of connective tissue in animals.
