Rapid advances in 3D printing are changing everything from medicine to clothing. Australian scientists are using the technology to make long-dreamed-of projects possible, and it may not be long before bionic bras hit the shelves and 3D-printed organs become available. Amanda Smith reports.

n the labs of the University of Wollongong's Innovation Campus, Professor Gordon Wallace is working on new kinds of 3D-printed biomaterials. One day he hopes this will include human organs. Right now, his experimentation ranges across wearable and implantable devices, from human cartilage to a bionic bra.

Professor Wallace is working on the bra with bio-mechanist Professor Julie Steele.

'The easiest way to explain it is if you're sitting down, the bra is relaxed and comfortable, and it's not constraining you,’ she says. 'If you were suddenly to get up and run for a bus and your breasts are bouncing, the bra will sense that and tighten up to give you the support that you need.

If we thought back five years that today we would be printing stem cells with a high level of viability in a 3D environment where we can control the development of those stem cells, five years ago it seemed like science fiction.

PROFESSOR GORDON WALLACE, DIRECTOR OF THE INTELLIGENT POLYMER RESEARCH INSTITUTE, UNIVERSITY OF WOLLONGONG

‘Then when you're on the bus it realises you don't need that support anymore and just relaxes. So it's responding to women's physical needs.’

The bionic bar would improve on current sports bras, which offer a lot of support but tend to be tight and uncomfortable.

'When you go to play sport you put on your sports bra and it can often be really restrictive,’ says Professor Steele. ‘We're trying to come up with a way to get function with comfort.’

Professor Wallace says that there are two essential components to the bionic bra. One is its ability to sense movement, the other is the ability to respond to that movement.

'We've been using nanotechnology to create fibres that are very sensitive to movement, and we've been involved in the development of a new artificial muscle technology,’ he says. ‘It simply uses fishing line, for example, and coils that fishing line to amplify movement.

‘It's the ability of just grams of that material to control kilograms of movement that's really got us excited about the possibilities of the bionic bra.’

Since the sensors and artificial muscles are fibrous, they can be integrated into the structure, replacing fibres that perform no active function in current bras. That means all the extra technology takes up no additional space.

Although it’s still in its prototype phase and requires a lot of design work, Professors Wallace and Steele are excited about the possibilities of the bionic bra because of its use of 3D printing.

The twisted fishing line is housed within customised components created by a 3D printer. Professor Wallace says that 3D printing has revolutionised the way scientists think about making things: ‘It's brought that creative exercise back in to the laboratory—the ability to make stuff using new types of materials and to customise componentry within the structure.’

Another wearable device that Professors Wallace and Steel are collaborating on using 3D printing is the ‘intelligent knee sleeve’. It's designed to prevent sports injuries by giving athletes direct feedback on how they land after jumping.

This is particularly pertinent in sports such as Aussie Rules, where ruptures to the anterior cruciate ligament in the knee are common and serious.

'We spent a couple of weeks with one of the AFL teams and worked with them with their landing training program,’ says Professor Steele.

‘We'd place it on their knee, set it to the right angle, and if they reach that angle it would beep to tell them that they'd actually landed using the appropriate motion'.

As with the bionic bra, the intelligent knee sleeve demonstrates how 3D printing can be used to customise devices.

'On both of these projects, with the advances in both sensor and in artificial muscle technology coupled with the parallel advances in fabrication, we're now at a point where we can get designers involved and design the structure not only to meet the requirements for performance, but to make sure that it can be manufactured from a commercial point of view,’ says Professor Wallace.

Professor Steele says they’ve been working on these projects for 15 years, but it's only very recently that the technology has caught up to the ideas.

'We did make prototypes that we could take out and test, but they just were not feasible to upscale. That's the difference now, we've got the ability to upscale,’ she says.

It's not only bionic wearables that Professor Wallace is developing. He's also involved in developing 3D printers that can create implantable medical devices.

This includes developing new inks that could enable the printing of stem cells to help in healing. Professor Wallace has also been collaborating with St Vincent's Hospital in Melbourne to develop a conduit for cartilage regeneration using the patient's own stem cells.

'We take adipose stem cells, which are fat stem cells, and deliver those in an appropriate structural environment. Our in vitro experiments already show that that's very effective and very efficient in regenerating cartilage,’ he says.

This will mean that when a sportsperson does rupture his or her anterior cruciate ligament, the resultant cartilage damage can be reversed.

‘Not only are we looking at ways of trying to prevent these injuries in the first place, but now when we do have this damage we're looking at ways that we can reconstruct things which were just not possible before,' says Professor Steele. ‘That's been the holy grail; how to regenerate cartilage.

'It's a handful of years away. In terms of the ability to regenerate nerve and muscle, it's a handful-to-something away.’ 

The end goal, of course, is to be able to print whole organs: hearts, livers and kidneys, ready for transplanting.

'In the meantime, maybe halfway along that journey, we're looking at implants to regenerate damaged bits of those organs by printing the appropriate parts in there,’ says Professor Wallace. ‘We're not going to replace biology, we're going to use 3D-printed structures that try and facilitate those naturally occurring biological processes to get the right outcomes.

'If we thought back five years that today we would be printing stem cells with a high level of viability in a 3D environment where we can control the development of those stem cells, five years ago it seemed like science fiction.'

A bespoke implantable organ printed with your own stem cells would circumvent the wait for a donated organ to become available.

'That's why there is such an interest around the world in these types of activities,' says Professor Wallace. 'A lot of technical challenges need to be overcome to enable us to deliver that level of sophistication, but it would be a brave person that would say it wouldn't be possible in the next 10 to 20 years.

'You have these advances in biomaterials, and rapid advances in stem cell technology. Couple that with these advances in 3D printing and the ability to use 3D printers to create the next generation of printers, and you really get this very exciting cycle of events which can take things forward in a very short period of time.’

Focusing on the physical, The Body Sphere is about the ways we use our bodies to create and compete, nurture and abuse, display and conceal.

Source: http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/bodysphere/from-bionic-bras-to-printed-stem-cells/6325180