Printers and Organs

Dear RepRap Users!

I want to ask you for help in a project which, I think, is a very important one.
Recently I read an article about the use of Ink jet printers in the field of Biology (biomimetic materials, tissue engineering) and I had the Idea to bring together experts in these fields with those who have a lot of experience with printers and printer hacking.
So I wrote an email to one of the leading scientists in this field Dr. Paul Calvert, and he wrote back and said that it is an interessting idea, he also explaind some of the problems they have at the moment.

So I want to build a site with a forum to support the whole thing.

You, dear Reprapers, have experience in the field of building 3D-Printers so I want to ask you for help, at the moment I want to ask you to take a look at the draft of sites-structure (especially the forum) and to give me a few suggestions:

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Main site
-Blog
-Forum
--Forum about Biology in general
--Forum about Printers
---Software
---Electronics
---Interfaces and cables
---Inkjet-heads
---Cartridges
---Motors/Stepper motors
---Feder-systems
---Power Supply
---Plastic housings
---Cleaning and sterilizing of Printer Parts
---Other
--forum for guidance (How-to's)
---Video section
---Documents
---Other
--Forum for the exchange of Hardware
---I need/ Iam searching for...
---I have to offer...
---Help with Transport
---Other
--Regional Forums
---North America
---South America
---Europe
---Asia
---Afrika
---Oceania
---Other
--Other Discussions not related to main topic (Offtopic)
--About the Forum
---Suggestions / Feedback
---Technical Support
---News and Updates
-chat
-Wiki about printers, tissue engineering and biomimetic materials
-List with useful links

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Thank you for your Time,
AlexanderB
(Austria)

AlexanderB: I'm told that the folks over at Fab@Home are selling a lot of their new second generation printers to organ printing labs. You might also want to talk to those guys.

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Hell, there are no rules here - we're trying to accomplish something.

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.

Thomas A. Edison

AlexanderB, you're welcome to piggyback on RepRap's infrastructure for all of this.

Frankly, that's what all of the stuff is here is for: research extending 3D printing.

Let me know if you want a dedicated folder of forums on a few dozen topics, or just one forum to begin with.

Also, let me know if you have any trouble creating wiki pages. The Example page:
[reprap.org]
is very handy.

This is our page on inkjet stuff:
[reprap.org]

I strongly suggest you leverage an existing community to do this rather than rolling your own wiki, forum, and so on.

Also, do you have a working RepRap or RepStrap?

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/06/2010 02:59AM by SebastienBailard.

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-Sebastien, RepRap.org library gnome.

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Remember, you're all RepRap developers (once you've joined the super-secret developer mailing list), and the wiki, RepRap.org, [reprap.org] is for everyone and everything!

... maybe this discussion is of interest for you too ...

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Viktor
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Aufruf zum Projekt "Müll-freie Meere" - [reprap.org] -- Deutsche Facebook-Gruppe - [www.facebook.com]

Call for the project "garbage-free seas" - [reprap.org]

@SebastienBailard
Thank you for your offer, but I think the whole thing is too far away from all the other Forums with similar topics about partial aspects, and someone else has to start a seperate forum, a wiki etc. to build something like a gateway to the whole subject.

I'll go on and warn you now, beware of using plastic in the design. Plastics have/develop a static charge that makes cells move around when printed. Also,
the chemicals used for cell binding react with anything carbon based.

And as I said in a previous thread somewhere, the reprap base is a great place to start, you just need a different tool head to handle biological liquids.

... for 'fixing' live cells to a specific position you can use gold: cells love gold-surfaces and hate plastic - so if you insert a gold-pin in a sheet or print plastic 'fences' on a gold surface, the cells will settle and stay in position ...

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Viktor
--------
Aufruf zum Projekt "Müll-freie Meere" - [reprap.org] -- Deutsche Facebook-Gruppe - [www.facebook.com]

Call for the project "garbage-free seas" - [reprap.org]

I have this strange feeling that Viktor has a spy camera mounted in my research lab...that is almost dead on correct with some of the research I'm doing. That was just a creepy response. :-)

Of course, most home users don't have access to gold plating equipment that won't kill the cells. Or they can't afford to do the gold plating.

And I think we are going to move away from using metals as a cell base. We recently had a skin graft go awry because the patient turned out to be allergic to gold. I think they are only person that I have ever met that was truly allergic to pure gold - and just my luck that they agreed to be a test subject.

Hi Cris,

... maybe growing 'nailheads' with galvanics is a good method to define cell-bases?

Atached are two images of platinum-nailheads - here we let platinum grow through some hundred nanometers thick capilaries in a 30micron thick polymer-membran until they were through and formed a 'nailhead' of around 30 microns in diameter.

I have some samples with smaller nailheads from 500 nanometer to 10 microns in size - most capillaries are around 100 nanometer thick, so the size of the resulting head can be even smaller than 500nm ...

There were other samples with gold and bismuth, but all other metalls should be doable too.

The image with the square-holes around a head shows the fabrication of single modules embedding a nanowire with the nailhead on top ... the holes were multi-shots with an excimer-laser and you can make any shape or depth you want in sizes and accuracies down to submicrons.

With a metallic surface coated with a thin layer of polymer you can cut any geometry through the polymer so the metal is revealed and you'll receive an array of small groves, craters or any geometrical shape with a metallic bottom ...

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Viktor
--------
Aufruf zum Projekt "Müll-freie Meere" - [reprap.org] -- Deutsche Facebook-Gruppe - [www.facebook.com]

Call for the project "garbage-free seas" - [reprap.org]

@SebastienBailard
Thank you for your offer, but I think the whole thing is too far away from all the other Forums with similar topics about partial aspects, and someone else has to start a seperate forum, a wiki etc. to build something like a gateway to the whole subject.

I still fail to understand why you can't organize a working group in a dedicated forum, and then grow that out into a larger community of 10,000 people inside the forums/mailing lists, while also carving out and personalizing a large chunk of wiki.

We're a research institution; there is no such thing as "too far away". And I think your fellow bio researchers will benefit from discussion and development with your fellow 3D printing researchers, as the discussion just now illustrates.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/06/2010 05:34PM by SebastienBailard.

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-Sebastien, RepRap.org library gnome.

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Remember, you're all RepRap developers (once you've joined the super-secret developer mailing list), and the wiki, RepRap.org, [reprap.org] is for everyone and everything!

I would also wonder about 'sputtering; gold particles onto a substrate. It would involve a thin film of gold across the opening of a small vacuum tube and high voltage electrons smashing into the gold and causing gold atoms to come out and stick to what ever they hit. I think it would only take a few atoms of gold to make a sticky place for one cell. And a thin film, which sputtering is good for, to hold a whole raft of cells.

Mike

... another method for 'grid-design' is a lattice of overcrossed wires (similar to oldstyle 'magnet-rings-on-copper-lattice-RAM' ) where you have the crossings (with metal-wires) or the gaps (with plastic-lattice on a metallic surface) as settling locations.

The thinnest wires i handled were bonding-wires from gold with 25 microns, platinum with 10 microns and Wollaston-wires with 1micron platinum core - previously embedded in a silver hull (for handling) with 50 microns diameter.

With the 1 micron Wollaston-wires stretched with a micro-tweezer over 6mm length i could define the position and orientation manually (selfdefined manual 5axis-microstage) with and accuracy of maybe 5 microns controlled by a microscope ... with better controlling this could be enhanced to submicron.

Imagine a lattice of 20x20 platinum 1micron-wires in a grid with 100 microns spacing, glued to the surface at the ends and placed single cells per crossing - so you'll get an cell-array of 2x2mm size and 400 precise located cells ...

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Viktor
--------
Aufruf zum Projekt "Müll-freie Meere" - [reprap.org] -- Deutsche Facebook-Gruppe - [www.facebook.com]

Call for the project "garbage-free seas" - [reprap.org]

AlexanderB, I decided to take a bit of initiative and create this new forum (and folder).

I think this may be a good way to help the community. I don't mean to cause trouble with you, however. Do you think it would hurt the greater
community if we worked together to host this here?

Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 05/08/2010 10:36AM by SebastienBailard.

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-Sebastien, RepRap.org library gnome.

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Remember, you're all RepRap developers (once you've joined the super-secret developer mailing list), and the wiki, RepRap.org, [reprap.org] is for everyone and everything!

I completely agree with Sebastien. Considering this site is free to use, ad-free and has a large membership, it would be best to build off of this one.

I dont really know...
I want something more elaborate, something which could be searched and could be overseen much easier, withe Wiki, chat and so on.

But thank you for your Forum, it might be of some use to get things started.

I thought this might be of interest in this forum.

[best-google-videos.com]

Regards
Marius Botha
Pretoria, South Africa
[mariushermanbotha.wordpress.com]