Engineering New Functional Materials for 3D Printing: From Cells and Biomaterials to Metals, Ceramics, Lunar Dust, and More

Presented By: Ramille Shah

3D-printing (3DP) technologies have emerged as promising fabrication tools with applications across many fields. The limited number of functional and scalable 3D printable inks, however, is preventing widespread adoption of its use as a leading manufacturing platform. In this talk, new strategies for expanding the functional material toolbox for extrusion-based 3D printing developed in my lab will be presented. I will discuss new 3D ink platforms with a major focus on their use for biomedical applications and describe how these developments have led to the discovery of new unexpected physical and functional material properties. The first platform uses partially cross-linked hydrogels to produce well-defined self-supporting as-printed architectures for soft complex tissue and organ engineering. We have developed the first single bioink method using polyethylene glycol cross-linkers (PEGX) for the synthesis of hydrogel inks for cell printing that can be easily manipulated to tune hydrogel mechanical, degradation, nanostructural, and bioactive properties without compromising printability. The second material platform is a new class of particle-laden 3D-printable liquid inks comprised of the particles of interest (60-80 vol.% solids content), an elastomeric, biocompatible and biodegradable polymer (20-40 vol.% solids content), and a series of organic solvents. These inks can be prepared under ambient conditions and rapidly 3D-printed via syringe extrusion at linear deposition rates upwards of 15 cm/s into highly bioactive and ready to use structures comprised of as many as hundreds or thousands of layers, with no drying time required prior to handling. The mechanisms governing the ability to directly 3D-print these new inks into self-supporting constructs will be presented, as well as the unique microstructural, physical, and biological properties of the resulting 3D-printed constructs. Expansion of this particle-laden ink system for creating highly scalable and economical 3D-printed structures for non-biomedical applications will also be discussed.

Biography: Prof. Ramille Shah earned her B.S. in Materials Science and Engineering (MSE) at Northwestern University and her Ph.D. in MSE with a specialty in Biomaterials from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a research focus on gene-supplemented collagen scaffolds for musculoskeletal tissue engineering. In 2006, she returned to Northwestern as a postdoctoral fellow at the Simpson Querrey Institute for BioNanotechnology focusing on self-assembling nanomaterials for regenerative medicine. In September 2009, she started her tenure-track faculty position with a joint appointment in the Departments of MSE and Surgery at Northwestern. Her research involves the development and characterization of new functional material inks that that are compatible with room temperature extrusion based 3D printing for both biomedical (e.g. complex tissue and organ engineering) and non-biomedical (e.g. energy and advanced structural) applications. Her group also focuses on understanding how 3D material ink processes and composition influence printability, as well as the properties and functionality of the resulting 3D-printed constructs. Her work has been published in various high impact journals, as well as featured in Crain's Chicago Business Magazine (40 Under 40) and other major national and international media outlets.