Tissue Models 3D Printed with Human-Derived Bioinks by Allegro 3D & Humabiologics

Rapid-throughput bioprinting company Allegro 3D, a spin-off from the University of California San Diego (UCSD), was awarded nearly $1 million in grant funding this spring to develop a next-generation digital light processing (DLP)-based 3D bioprinter, commercialized under the name Stemaker, for printing in-vitro tissue models at the industrial scale. Now, the company is partnering with regenerative medicine startup Humabiologics to use human bioinks and develop tissue models for drug screening, cell culture, regenerative medicine, and therapeutics applications. 

Humabiologics, which specializes in human-derived biomaterials, and Allegro 3D are both focused on using biomaterials and bioprinting technology to advance human healthcare. By working together and combining Allegro 3D’s fast, advanced DLP bioprinter—capable of direct printing in multiwell plates—with Humabiologics’ human bioinks, the two will speed up the high-throughout additive manufacturing of advanced human tissues and enable solutions that can improve the accuracy and efficiency of drug discovery, help create patient-specific therapies, and develop predictive disease models.

“Allegro 3D aspires to accelerate precision medicine with our rapid high-throughput bioprinters and a wide selection of bioinks. By partnering with Humabiologics, we are proud to be the first bioprinting company to provide total solutions for manufacturing clinically-relevant human tissues with human-derived biomaterials,” stated Allegro 3D’s CEO and Co-Founder Dr. Wei Zhu.

According to Allegro 3D, its STEMAKER is one of the fastest, most high-resolution bioprinters in the industry, with the ability to print live tissue constructs for screening and high-throughput assays that feature complex and intricate microscopic features, like vascularized human liver tissues. In fact, the company states that the DLP-based STEMAKER system can fabricate physiologically relevant tissue samples in a matter of seconds…talk about rapid.

Take this capability of quickly printing tissue models directly in multiwell plates and pair it with the affordable, high-quality human-derived biomaterials that Humabiologics creates and commercializes for bioprinting, cell therapy, drug screening, and tissue and disease modeling, and you’ve got quite the combination.

“We are excited to partner with Allegro 3D to provide clinically-relevant human-derived biomaterials that allow for fabricating human tissue models for rapid drug screening. Our off-the-shelf human bioinks complementing Allegro 3D’s transformative bioprinting technology and we look forward to develop other bioink formulas through our partnership to support researchers who are looking for reliable alternatives to animal testing for drug discovery,” said Dr. Mohammad Albanna, the CEO and Founder of Humabiologics.

Together, the two companies have demonstrated that human-derived bioinks made on the STEMAKER platform feature excellent printability, as well as biocompatibility, and can help increase the efficiency of the drug discovery process, along with decreasing the use of animal testing, which is always a good thing.

You can order these new bioinks on the Allegro 3D website.