My name is Professor Robert Brown. I'm from the UCL Institute of Orthopaedics. 0:00:16.560,0:00:18.939 And I'm a tissue engineer.
Tissue engineering comes from--
evolves out of things like this, which is a very early knee prosthesis.
And you see it's steel and there are plastic parts as well. They are extremely successful in the body.
They're used throughout surgery now.
But basically they never become part of you. They're always a wearing-out implant.
The dream that led to tissue engineering was the idea that we could, instead of making this,
we could make living tissues to go in to your body.
The first paradigm, the first idea towards this was to take cells from
people and put them into 3-D
polymeric artificial scaffoldings that looked roughly
like the tissue shape you wanted
and hope and work and engineer, growing that up over long periods of time
into the tissue you wanted.
This has turned out to have quite a
a range of limitations because effectively you're indirectly engineering.
You're hoping and working on the cells to do things for you
and the controls aren't very good for that reason, and the speed of course is very slow.
It's a cultivation process.
So we found that we could stumble on
a means to do what is something of a dream, really,
of a vision of making issues, like you make mobile phones, engineering them directly.
And this comes from a
material, which is this one here,
which is collagen. It's a protein that makes up the majority of your tissues and your cells
are embedded into it.
It's a strong protein, makes about a quarter of your ligaments and tendons and so forth.
This is what it looks like when it has been made into
a gel in the laboratory with cells embedded in it.
As you can see it's pink because of the culture material
but it's extremely weak. In fact, it's 99% water.
You see the water is oozing out of it already.
If I place it on here and this was an accident we stumbled on in the lab some years ago,
doing something, a really strange thing in effect,
is to compress this. So if we put the blotting paper on the bottom,
and the weight on the top,
you end up with a compression system
where the fluid is forced very rapidly out of that collagen material
from around the cell. Surprisingly the cells aren't damaged by this.
And what you end up with is something very dense,
controllably dense, like these here, sheets of in fact living tissue. This is
natural protein, which is what you're made of,
and your cells if that's what's placed in it.
But in this particular case, the process is pretty well completely controllable because
we control how much fluid goes out there for how much cell density, how much protein density.
And because of the direction,
you get very biomimetic, tissue-like stacking of layers as well.
They are thin, though, you can see here.
And if you're making a complex tissue like skin,
this actually turns out to be an advantage because it's different further down and changes
all the way up so we have now this concept of building up
tissues by layer engineering, by stacking them.
So instead of spiralling these together, which is what we've done with these two pieces here,
we can stack them on top of one another
and make tissues which are different as you go up.
Each of these of course will be made intentionally
rather like a computer generates material, so it could be made very simply differently.
The first clinical application of this, because it's thin and transparent,
is likely to be with the Institute of Opthamology, with work on the corneal transplantation,
where stem cells are placed over a burned cornea
and they'll be carried on this collagen,
which has made in front of the patient in the operating theatre.
And here we get the clue to why this is such an exciting paradigm shift we think
in our eyes.
This is an automatable process.
And we've been working for some while now with a company called Tap,
and they've made this machine which effectively
compresses many, in this case 24 of these pieces of tissue, all in one go within 45 minutes. So instead of
this happening in days or even weeks,
with lots of culturing, not much control, it now happens with very high control but within
a very short period of time.
Potentially of course at the bedside. So now instead of having a long process outside the theatre,
this could all happen next to the patient.
What's more, and this is what this machine is designed for,
these are now ideal for making for testing materials, for testing--
replacing animals for testing pharmaceuticals, for screening chemical toxic agents.
And this could effectively save thousands and thousands of animal experiments in the early screening times,
simply by making
hundreds of these tissues and screening your agents on them.
So this incidentally is what a series of those look like when they come out,
so many, many identical tissues. This is the point they're all much better than animal tissues in that way.
They're absolutely identical.
And they're made in this manner here. This is the primaeval way we did it originally,
and you can see now the tissue is left
compressed onto there,
very, very thin,
but dense at the level that we calculate it to be,
and you effectively just spiral it like this,
or in fact layer it stack on stack on stack.
And this is now
a piece of engineerable, manufacturable tissue
in minutes.