A study of 3D printing at Griffith University’s Menzies Institute has created a ‘bioprinter’, that will be able to grow both human tissue and bone based on a patient’s cells. The newly printed body parts could revolutionise the dental industry and help rural communities receive quicker and better oral health care.
Periodontist Professor Saso Ivanovski and his team intend to print individual bone and gum implants that can be placed in a patient’s jaw bone.
“The ground-breaking approach begins with a scan of the affected jaw, prior to the design of a replacement part using computer-assisted design,” said Ivanovski.
“A specialised bioprinter, which is set at the correct physiological temperature (in order to avoid destroying cells and proteins) is then able to successfully fabricate the gum structures that have been lost to disease—bone, ligament and tooth cementum—in one single process. The cells, the extracellular matrix and other components that make up the bone and gum tissue are all included in the construct and can be manufactured to exactly fit the missing bone and gum for a particular individual.
With the new bioprinter cases that would previously had a lot of difficulty with implants will become far more manageable.
“In the case of people with missing teeth who have lost a lot of jawbone due to disease or trauma, they would usually have these replaced with dental implants,” said Ivanovski.
“However, in many cases there is not enough bone for dental implant placement, and bone grafts are usually taken from another part of the body, usually their jaw, but occasionally it has to be obtained from their hip or skull.
“These procedures are often associated with significant pain, nerve damage and postoperative swelling, as well as extended time off work for the patient.
“By using this sophisticated tissue engineering approach, we can instigate a much less invasive method of bone replacement. A big benefit for the patient is that the risks of complications using this method will be significantly lower because bone doesn’t need to be removed from elsewhere in the body. We also won’t have the problem of limited supply that we have when using the patient’s own bone.”
The study is currently in pre-clinical trials and the team are hopeful it will be available to patients in one to two years.
