hubert tseng: we take cells from all sources – from animals, human cell lines – and then we magnetize them to make a three-dimensional structure. ♪ music ♪ so take your imagination to where – what you
stem cells and 3d printing, can do with magnetized cells. let's say you have an injury to your skin or injury to your heart or stomach lining; we can magnetize cells – stem cells from those regions and put them there in the specific wound where it'll
have a regenerative or a therapeutic effect. so all we really do is we sprinkle a nanoparticle over the cells to magnetize them overnight. the next day, what we'll do is we'll take the cells and we'll move them into this 384 well plate. we'll then print the cells into spheroids just by placing the 384 well plate onto this magnetic drive. we'll be able to form one spheroid per well. we'll leave this 384 well plate on the magnet for anywhere between fifteen minutes to overnight. the next day, we can then release the plate off of
the magnetic drive and allow the cells to culture long term. the majority of biomedical research has been done on two-dimensional surfaces, either glass or plastic. these surfaces and these models have – do not represent native tissue or don't replicate functionality. and so we know that we had to go to three-dimensional structures, but there are issues with, "how do we test them; how do we image?" basically, "what do the cells look like in those three-dimensional structures?" we took induced pluripotent stem
cell cardiomyocytes – so essentially, your skin cells that are differentiated into heart cells – and then we aggregated them into a spheroid, and then they started beating. they kind of naturally just started beating on their own, and so that was really neat. in 2d, it's very hard to see these cells beat. essentially, imagine a glass kind of beating. it wouldn't – it just kind of vibrates. so in 3d, we were actually able to get like a very contractile – it looks like a heart beating. this is an nsf
funded project because a lot of 3d cell culture systems today, while they recreate native tissue and environments, suffer from technical issues such as ease of handling, exchange of
media, things that are important for cell culture and cell maintenance, and so using our system with magnets and magnetic forces, we're offer a lot – we're offering ease in handling as well as a high throughput and control.
