When I visited Jennifer Lewis’s lab earlier this summer, doctoral researcher Paul Stankey showed me how the team is laying the groundwork for bioprinting, from stem cells to vascular networks — the focus of the first part in this series.But building tissues in the lab is only half the story.The real test is translation: scaling these breakthroughs into therapies that are fast, safe, and practical enough for patients.
Based in Cambridge, Lewis’ lab at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the Wyss Institute at Harvard may be pioneering bioprinting machines, but scaling up is where ambition meets reality.Bioprinting a patch is one thing.Printing an entire heart is another.
For Stankey and his colleagues, the challenge is not just what they can make, but how to make it fast enough, safely enough, and at scales that matter for patients.Hybrid Thinking and AI Shortcuts Scaling up remains the elephant in the room.Bioprinting large, living organs is slow, expensive, and constrained by biology, noted Stankey.
“Cells outside their nutrient medium survive only a couple of hours before they need blood flow.In fact, you only have about an hour to two hours from the time you take the cells out of the media to the time you have to have blood flowing through them.That’s about the window we have, and it makes speed critical.
And this is a classic challenge with 3D printing, it just takes a while to make these things.” That’s why his team is exploring hybrid methods.“For bigger constructs, molding can make the major shape really fast, and then you just print the vessels.It’s much faster that way.” The trick, he added, is that different vessel sizes demand different strategies.
“Co-SWIFT is really good for 3D printing everything about half a millimeter and larger, but vessels in your body go down to 10 microns.We have to figure out different techniques as we start fabricating those smaller-scale vessels.” It’s the same urgency that shapes his attitude toward failure: “One of my mentors used to say: you will fail in every way possible before you succeed.At the time, I hated hearing that.
But years later, I called him and said, ‘You were right.’” Paul Stankey at the back of the lab next to a multi-axis bioprinter — a custom machine developed in-house by the Lewis Lab, first pioneered by Jennifer Lewis and her then-postdoc Mark Skylar-Scott.Today it anchors much of the lab’s effort to print complex, living tissues.Image courtesy of 3DPrint.com.
And then there’s artificial intelligence (AI).Surprisingly, one of the most practical uses of AI in the lab isn’t predicting biology, but writing printer code.“Codes that used to take me three or four days now take a couple of hours.
When I first isolated a heart artery model from a CT scan, it took days.With AI, I did it in two hours.It’s a reminder that even in the most advanced biomedical labs, some of the hurdles are purely computational.
And tools like AI can be just as transformative as new materials.” Toward Tomorrow Bioprinting is not yet ready to deliver fully functional hearts or kidneys.But layer by layer, researchers like Stankey are closing the gap.From stem cells spun out of skin samples to printed vessels that can actually sustain life, the Lewis Lab is turning science fiction into an engineered reality.
Throughout our conversation, Stankey kept coming back to the same priority: patients.Whether he was describing bioreactors, hybrid printing methods, or the philosophy behind the lab’s design, he always circled back to the patients: “We’re thinking about any way we can get this to patients.That’s the whole point of what we’re trying to do.” He’s also impatient with long timelines.
“I don’t like five-year plans.I like going from idea to implementation as fast as possible.That drive keeps the work from drifting into theory: every experiment is framed by how quickly it might move into real use.” That patient-first philosophy is also part of what makes working in Lewis’s lab a unique experience.
Stankey described an environment where the “science is ambitious, but the support is deeply personal.” “Jennifer treats us so well.She’s not just our advisor for the PhD; she’s thinking about our next step.Do we want to go into industry? Start a company? Be faculty? She tailors expectations to each of us.” That flexibility, he says, is why many students stay on even after finishing their PhDs: “She’s more concerned with whether you’re ready for what’s next than with ticking boxes.
That makes this a phenomenal place to be.” Jennifer Lewis’ Lab at Harvard’s SEAS.Image courtesy of 3DPrint.com.The competition outside the lab keeps the urgency high as well.
“To our knowledge, we’re the furthest along,” he says.“But everyone’s quiet about this stuff.No one wants to give away where they are until they publish.
It’s a healthy competition, it makes us work faster, because the point is to get these to patients as fast as possible.” The Lewis Lab feels like a workshop for the future of medicine.And if the vision of 3D printed organs one day reaches patients, it will be because of places like this and researchers like Paul Stankey.Subscribe to Our Email Newsletter Stay up-to-date on all the latest news from the 3D printing industry and receive information and offers from third party vendors.
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