JULY 2023LIFE SCIENCES REVIEW8IN MY OPINIONust a few years ago, the field of 3D bioprinting was considered science fiction. Questions like: "Seriously, printing organs for organ transplantation is really possible?" or: "3D bioprinted models can replace animal models in drug discovery?" Fast forward, and today 3D bioprinting is steadily becoming commonplace in biomedical research. Thanks to intensive work by thousands of scientists across the globe during the last decade, bioprinting is already an essential driving force accelerating drug discovery today.In the past, many great discoveries related to cell biology, genetics, cancer, and cell differentiation have been made leveraging 2D cell culture technologies. While it was necessary for the progress of science, it is also common knowledge that 2D models do not resemble the complexity of the actual in vivo environment and cannot translate results to novel therapies and treatments. Therefore, it becomes clear that 3D models will play a crucial part in helping us solve health challenges. Just think about it, which of our organs grow flat?What is 3D bioprinting? In short, bioprinting is an additive manufacturing process that uses a digital file as a blueprint to print an object layer by layer, using embedded biomaterials, which allows the creation of organ-like structures with living cells mimicking native tissue in a human body. Unlike other biofabrication techniques, 3D bioprinting is a high-throughput, scalable, precise, and reproducible method. But before we discuss the advantages of 3D bioprinting and their implications in drug discovery, we will dive into the history of bioprinting to understand how fast the field is developing. The founder of 3D bioprinting, Professor Thomas Boland at Clemson University, developed the first bioprinter in the early 2000s. His research group modified a Hewlett-Packard inkjet printer to be able to deposit cells in a cell culture medium. Later, modifications of the bioprinters enabled the cells to be deposited in bioinks, which led to the creation of 3D structures. Since then, the field of 3D bioprinting has exploded.How can 3D bioprinting impact the drug development industry?Finding a drug candidate and taking it to market can take up to 10 years. A rough estimation of the average costs to bring a drug to market range from $1.3 billion to more than $2 billion. Unfortunately, over 90% of the drugs fail during pharmaceutical development, which is the biggest reason for such high costs. Researchers are developing promising solutions for lowering these costs, and no doubt using 3D bioprinting is one of them. For instance, 3D bioprinting enables high-throughput compound screening on functional 3D tissue models. This can ensure that ineffective compounds or ones with unintended side effects do not progress further down the pipeline. As a result, it significantly lowered the cost and expedited the time-consuming process of drug candidate elimination that exists today. Remember that 2D cell culture models expose false data related to compound effects, leading to inaccurate results and conclusions and increasing attrition and cost. Equally problematic is that compounds that make it past the 2D testing phase are tested on animal models, which only By Itedale Namro Redwan, CSO, CELLINK3D BIOPRINTING: ACCELERATING DRUG DISCOVERYItedale Namro RedwanJ
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