Bioprinted Implant May Help Paralyzed People Walk Again
Abigail Klein Leichman via Israel21c – Medical science has not yet found a way to restore walking ability in someone paralyzed from a traumatic spinal cord injury.
Within a few years, a first-of-its-kind 3D-printed spinal cord tissue implant, made from the patient’s own cells, could make that dream come true.
Using technology developed over the course of a decade in Prof. Tal Dvir’s regenerative biotechnology lab at Tel Aviv University, the implant enabled paralyzed lab mice to walk again.
A paper published today in Advanced Science provides the remarkable details.
“It is like science fiction,” says Dr. Asaf Toker, CEO of Matricelf, the company working to bring Dvir’s groundbreaking technology to market.
ISRAEL21c readers may recall that two years ago, Dvir’s lab 3D-printed the world’s first miniature vascularized human heart.
Dvir and Alon Sinai cofounded Matricelf that year and it went public in 2021. On January 30, the company signed an exclusive global licensing agreement with Tel Aviv University technology transfer company Ramot to commercialize and utilize the patent for 3D-printing tissues and organs.
“With our technology, we can create any tissue we want,” Toker tells ISRAEL21c. “The first one is neural implants for people with a spinal cord injury causing paralysis.”
No Rejection
Dvir explained that the technique begins with taking a small biopsy of belly fat tissue from the patient.
“This tissue, like all tissues in our body, consists of cells together with an extracellular matrix of substances like collagens and sugars,” he explained.
“After separating the cells from the extracellular matrix, we used genetic engineering to reprogram the cells, reverting them to a state that resembles embryonic stem cells capable of becoming any type of cell in the body.”
The extracellular matrix didn’t go to waste. It formed the basis of a personalized hydrogel that will not trigger an immune response or rejection after implantation – which is the main problem with donor implants.