FAMU Pharmacy Professor Mandip Sachdeva has become the first scientist in the United States to reproduce a cornea using human cells in 3D. His groundbreaking research could help scientists get closer to helping people see again.
His research was produced in the FAMU College of Pharmacy and was funded by the National Science Foundation.
Sachdeva's first of its kind is just the tip of the iceberg. He's being assisted by his 20 year old research assistant Paul Dinh. Diah said, he became interested in tissue engineering while in high school and began exploring the subject on YouTube. And, FAMU is providing him an opportunity to explore his interests in way he never imagined by working in the lab trying to better understand how the human eye heals.
"We thought, 'Why can't we 3D print a cornea?'" said professor Mandip Sachdeva, who leads the team. "We have been trying to learn every day and we have learned a lot in the process."
The group has spent the past year and a half creating an entire 3D model of a blinking eyeball. The corneas are printed in 3D by a bio-printer, and made from materials including human cells.
"That's like making a recipe for a good dish. You have to have a good recipe for your cornea," Sachdeva said.
The cornea technology was created by a scientist in the United Kingdom, but the lab is expanding on it, making it more efficient by creating a mold to print multiples.
"I was here really late at the lab and it took me so long because I had to print, like, 12 corneas, or something, for the week, so I thought, man, we need to come up with something so we can print 6," Dinh recalled.
The diameter and dimension of an average cornea are entered into the printer. It takes roughly 10 minutes to make half-a-dozen corneas.
"Regular 3D printers, normally they extrude some sort of hot plastic that eventually takes the shape of whatever you want," Dinh said. "Same thing as a bio-printer, except instead of extruding a hot plastic, we can extrude materials that are similar or present in the human body."