Biological functions made printable: smart bioprinting with agency and control over cell fate and human tissue development

Three-dimensional bioprinting holds the promise to transform medicine and biology by assembling living matter into lab-made human tissues. Today’s bioprinting excels at producing anatomical shapes, to an extent unmatched by other technologies. However, in native tissues, biological function is intimately linked to architecture, but also tissue maturation and morphogenesis, processes that dynamically evolve as cells respond to environmental stimuli. Bioprinting has no way to follow maturation over time and intervene to guide cells, severely limiting the ability to fully mimic organ functions. Capturing and controlling tissue’s adaptive behaviour in bioprinted tissues can bring the long sought goal of engineering organ parts and its revolutionary potential within reach. To achieve this goal, SMART-AGENT introduces a groundbreaking adaptive bioprinting technology able to directly instruct cells and guide tissue maturation with exquisite spatial and temporal precision. To make this possible, I will develop light-based printers that, leveraging advanced imaging, computer vision, and artificial intelligence, are able to “see” and “understand” the content and composition (cellular, chemical, architectural) of the printing environment. Elaborating this information, printers will automatically make decisions on how to generate printed parts and how to intervene directly on cell behaviour at any desired moment. Converging biofabrication and optogenetics, our adaptive bioprinting suite will trigger programmable cell response via light stimuli provided by the printer itself, effectively making cell functions 3D printable. Bringing together my unique expertise in photonics, bioprinting, cell engineering and synthetic biology, I will first assess the potential of this technology by developing vascularized human endocrine pancreas models with physiological-like function. This will open new avenues to study diabetes and to investigate human biology with unprecedented precision.