A strange new technological advancement has taken advantage of the same machine that makes cotton candy in order to spin tiny thread networks that could someday form organs, according to the Daily Mail. The new advancement, which could someday saves lives, was created by scientist Leon Bellan and utilizes threads that are the same size and shape as the patterns formed by human capillaries, which are the tiny, thin-walled vessels responsible for delivering oxygen and nutrients to cells.
Bellan, who is an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Vanderbilt University, created the device by using a $40 cotton candy machine that he purchased from Target. He claims that the machine will eventually be able to create 3D artificial capillary systems that can sustain living cells for more than a week, a great improvement over current methods.
"Some people in the field think this approach is a little crazy," Bellan said. "But now we've shown we can use this simple technique to make microfluidic networks that mimic the three-dimensional capillary system in the human body in a cell-friendly fashion."
"Generally, it's not that difficult to make two-dimensional networks, but adding the third dimension is much harder; with this approach, we can make our system as three-dimensional as we like," he added.
The new device is the latest in a string of recent efforts that aim to create artificial organs at a low cost, with 3D printing being the other popular method, according to Popular Science. However, the distribution of polymer fibers is much more complicated than the cotton candy hydrogel, making this a technique that offers plenty of potential in the field.
Now that the machine has been verified to work, Bellan and his team of researchers hope to recreate specific organ tissues and eventually create templates for numerous organs to allow teams from all over the world to easily replicate them, according to ScienceAlert.
The research was published in the Feb. 4 issue of the journal Advanced Healthcare Materials.
