Powdered sugar is the special ingredient in a Rice University recipe for mimicking the body’s intricate, branching blood vessels in lab-grown tissues.

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In research published today in the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering, Rice bioengineers showed they could keep densely packed cells alive for two weeks in relatively large constructs by creating complex blood vessel networks from templates of 3D-printed sugar.

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“One of the biggest hurdles to engineering clinically relevant tissues is packing a large tissue structure with hundreds of millions of living cells,” said study lead author Ian Kinstlinger, a bioengineering graduate student in Rice’s Brown School of Engineering. “Delivering enough oxygen and nutrients to all the cells across that large volume of tissue becomes a monumental challenge.” Kinstlinger explains that nature solved this problem through the evolution of complex […]

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