CARDIOPRINT - Advanced multifunction 3D biofabrication for the generation of computationally modelled human-scale therapeutic cardiac tissues
CARDIOPRINT is born with the ambition of shaping a quantum leap in the fields of Additive Manufacturing and Biofabrication of therapeutic human cardiac tissues, at both the technological and applicative levels. The overall concept of this enterprising project is to develop a new multifunctional additive manufacturing technology able to provide the sufficient accuracy for the manufacturing of human tissues at an organ scale for the first time.
The main aim of CARDIOPRINT is to advance the biofabrication field by the concomitant development of a novel device capable of generating bioartificial human tissues with unprecedented precision, plus the needed cardio-mimetic biomaterials and a new cardiac image-to-transplant workflow. Our approach is centred on upscaling towards translation and will be uniquely based on a large animal model (pig).
CARDIOPRINT combines the development of the latest innovations in 3D printing, biomaterials and stem cells, with the capability of Computational Modeling to provide a biomimetic and personalized design based on cardiac data.
The project will not only address the technological issues related to 3D printing accuracy and materials portfolio, but will work on its valorization in a high impact disease: cardiac ischemia. The objective will be to build a human-sized bioartificial heart (BioHeart), using the pig heart as a scale analog, using mechanical, functional and electrical data for the generation of the necessary model through state-of-the-art computational modeling.
This project is funded by MCIN/AEI /10.13039/501100011033 and by the European Union NextGenerationEU/PRTR.
