New Live-cell Printing Technique Based on Chinese Woodblocking

Scientists in Houston have developed a new method of printing living cells in almost any shape, based on 3^rd century Chinese woodblock printing techniques. They’ve named the technique Block-Cell-Printing, or BloC-Printing.

In a similar way to the rubber stamps we played with as children (apart from with cells not ink), this technique produces 2D cell arrays in as little as half an hour, with the cells only 5 micrometres apart. Previous cell printing techniques have used inkjet-based printing, which work well, but often only 50-80% of the inkjetted cells survive. In BloC-Printing almost 100% of the cells survive. As Dr Lidong Qin, one of the inventers of BloC-Printing says, “Cell printing is used in so many different ways now — for drug development and in studies of tissue regeneration, cell function, and cell-cell communication”, so this new technique could benefit many fields.

BloC-Printing works by guiding the cells into hook-like traps in a silicon mould, using microfluidic physics. The cells flow down a column in the mould, past cells already trapped there, to the next available slot. This leads to a grid of cells trapped on the mould. When creating the mould, the shape of the columns and the position and spacing of the traps can be manipulated to create a wide variety of shapes. Once the mould is lifted off, the cells stick to the growing medium they’ve been placed on in the desired shape.

Inkjet still has the edge in certain ways: it is faster and BloC-Printing can’t yet print multi-layer structures which inkjetting can. However, an Inkjet printer costs between $10,000 and $200,000, whereas the cost of a BloC mould is only about $1, so the BloC-Printing potential is massive.