Professor Jason Burdick 

Photo caption: Morgan Riffe (left), a PhD candidate in Materials Science & Engineering, looks on while Meg Cooke, PhD, research associate in the BioFrontiers Institute, explains the 3D printing process to fabricate biomaterial scaffolds.

The Materials Science and Engineering Program at the University of Colorado Boulder received a $1M grant to fund interdisciplinary doctoral research training in biofabrication.

The National Institutes of Health T32 award will support this rapidly developing field, which enables precise and effective ways to study and treat various medical conditions, such as growing new organs for transplants or repairing damaged tissues.

The grant, along with support from CU Boulder’s College of Engineering and Applied Science, Research & Innovation Office (RIO), the Graduate School and various departments and programs, will support five new trainees each year for a period of two years each, over the next five years. Professors Jason Burdick and Stephanie Bryant with the Materials Science and Engineering Program, Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering and the BioFrontiers Institute are the principal investigators.

“Biofabrication is an emerging field with growing advances each year,” Burdick said. “It’s important to train students in this field to not only advance their own dissertation research, but also to train a future workforce that will help turn biofabrication methods into new products and clinical therapies.”

Biofabrication uses advanced 3D processing techniques, allowing engineers to design and build materials that serve as tools in medical research and treatments. Examples of these materials include: scaffolds that support the growth and development of new tissues, microparticles used for targeted drug delivery, and microfluidic platforms, which are small-scale devices that manipulate tiny amounts of fluids for research and diagnostic purposes.

Representative biofabrication technologies include 3D printing, the use of electrospinning to create fine fibers similar to natural tissues and photopatterning to develop detailed and complex designs.

The ability to shape material structures at such a detailed level can be used to grow new tissues for transplants or repair damaged organs, develop materials that can help the body heal itself by promoting the growth of healthy cells, design microparticles that can deliver medication directly to targeted areas in the body, provide more accurate environments for growing cells in the lab, and create more realistic models of human tissues for research and testing to reduce the need for animal models.

At CU Boulder, students applying to the program will be starting their second year of PhD training in one of the following five engineering disciplines—biological engineering, biomedical engineering, chemical engineering, materials science and engineering, and mechanical engineering. Those accepted to the training program will be supervised and mentored by the T32 preceptors based in these engineering departments and programs and co-mentored by clinical collaborators to provide a biomedical and clinical focus to the work.

“This training program builds upon the excellence in biofabrication that we have in engineering at CU Boulder,” Bryant said. “It offers an exciting new opportunity for our graduate students to gain a deeper understanding of biofabrication, complementing the core knowledge they are developing in their PhD program.”

As part of the training program, a monthly seminar series will be developed for students and postdocs across biofabrication groups to share their work within the community. Students will also receive a certificate in biofabrication. The group will create a website for the training program and include biofabrication resources to the broader community.