Two FTUI students initiated the innovation of Personalized Artificial Heart Epicardium by Using 3D Bioprinting as an Effort to Reduce Post-Transplant Rejection Reaction Rates. Yasmina Ashfa Zahidah and Ahmad Daelamy Yusuf who are members of the Biomedic Team are students of the Biomedia Engineering Study Program, Department of Electrical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Universitas Indonesia (FTUI) Batch 2021.
Thanks to this innovative idea, they won First Place in the Bimeneorty Essay Competition organized by Sumatra Institute of Technology (ITERA). The competition which took place on September 10 2022 has the theme “Medical Technology Innovation for Involving and Contribution to Support SDGs of Good Heath and Well-Being”
“We made an innovation by printing epicardium for artificial hearts which are widely used with the 3D bioprinting method. Our idea focuses on the application of tissue engineering using cells from patients, so that the printed epicardium tissue for an artificial heart matches the patient’s own cells. This is to minimize the potential for artificial heart rejection by the patient’s body, so that the potential for using artificial hearts can be maximized to become a replacement method for ordinary heart transplants,” said Yasmina, team leader of the Biomedic Team.
Dean of FTUI, Prof. Dr. Heri Hermansyah, ST., M.Eng., IPU said, “3D bioprinting itself is classified as additive manufacturing. This method is defined as a process for creating personalized implantable medical devices based on specific data from each patient. As a result, the resulting implanted medical device is made from the patient’s own cells, and has dimensions that match the tissue being replaced. This method will definitely help reduce the patient’s body’s rejection of the new heart being transplanted.”
The 3D bioprinting method has certain advantages when using cells directly from the patient’s cells, namely the scaffolds or scaffolds from the artificial heart will integrate more quickly with the patient’s body tissues, the risk of rejection is smaller because of the minimal difference in components. This will certainly help patients recover more quickly and be the right solution for the problems described earlier.
In order to produce a new tissue, the bioprinting mechanism must go through several stages, namely the stages of pre-processing, processing, post-processing, evaluation, and application to the patient’s body. In the pre-processing stage, a scan will be carried out on the patient’s body using CT or MRI with the aim of seeing the morphology and structure of the target tissue, which in this idea is the outer layer of the heart or epicardium tissue, and to produce a specific 3D mapping of the patient’s heart.
The scan results will be converted so that they can be read by a 3D printer using CAD software, so that it can be adjusted from design to print results to be compatible and similar to the patient’s heart. Next is the processing stage, this stage will print an artificial network from a 3D bioprinter machine using the bioink base material that was made before. The printed tissue will then be inserted into the bioreactor with the aim that the tissue can adapt first. After the tissue has passed adaptation, the tissue can be applied to the patient’s body.
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Bureau of Public Communications
Faculty of Engineering, Universitas Indonesia