A possible weapon against the pandemic: Printing human tissue

As shortages of personal protective equipment persist during the coronavirus pandemic, 3-D printing has helped to alleviate some of the gaps. But Anthony Atala, the director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, and his team are using the process in a more innovative way: creating tiny replicas of human organs — some as small as a pinhead — to test drugs to fight Covid-19.

The team is constructing miniature lungs and colons — two organs particularly affected by the coronavirus — then sending them overnight by courier for testing at a biosafety lab at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. While they initially created some of the so-called organoids by hand using a pipette, they are beginning to print these at scale for research as the pandemic continues to surge.

In the past few years, Dr. Atala’s institute had already printed these tiny clusters of cells to test drug efficacy against bacteria and infectious diseases like the Zika virus, “but we never thought we’d be considering this for a pandemic,” he said. His team has the ability to print “thousands an hour,” he said from his lab in Winston-Salem, N.C.