The Science Daily website has reported that Chinese researchers have created a new method that can be used to treat gastric injuries instead of the conventional ones like endoscopic surgery.
According to the German News Agency, a member of the research team said "Gastric wall injury is a common problem in the digestive tract, and about 12 percent of the world's population suffers from it to varying degrees."
"Bioprinting aimed at delivering new cells directly to the wound site to repair the tissue offers a potentially very useful way to treat the problem," he explained.
Researcher Tao Xu, from Tsinghua University, Beijing, said:"The difficulty is that current bioprinting technology focuses on external sites. Bioprinters are normally quite large, and cannot be applied to inner tissue repair without invasive surgery to give enough room for the printing operation."
To overcome this, the team developed a microrobot that enters the body via an endoscope to treat ulcers and other gastric wall injuries.
The robot is composed of a fixed base, and a moving platform. It can fold itself down when entering the patients' body, then unfold before beginning the bioprinting operation.
"Tests showed promising results. A 10-day cell culture showed that printed cells remained at a high viability and a steady proliferation, which indicated good biological function of the cells in treating gastric wounds on the long run," said Tao Xu.
The next phase of the studies will focus on reducing the size of the bioprinting platform and developing bioinks, he concluded.
