The Bioprinter project, a three-way initiative from MaRS Innovation, the University of Toronto and Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, was featured on Canada AM on January 29 during a segment with Dr. Marla Shapiro, the program’s Health and Medical Expert.

The Bioprinter, whose commercial applications are being developed by MI’s Fanny Sie, is a 3D printer than can print on organic material, including skin.

Click here to watch the full segment on CTV’s Canada AM. 

Shapiro visited Dr. Marc Jeschke and his team in his lab at Sunnybrook to talk about how the Bioprinter works and benefits it can provide to burn victims and the healthcare industry. Shapiro collaborates on the project with Professor Axel Guenther’s lab at the University of Toronto.

Traditionally, doctors perform a skin graft to heal burn wounds, which places existing healthy skin over the burn. Instead, the Bioprinter uses cells from the patient’s own skin to produce new skin that can be grafted over the burn rather than increasing the wound size by taking the patients own skin.

The skin the Bioprinter produces has components that skin grafted from elsewhere on the body may not have, including colour, pigment, sweat glands and sensation.

Posted by Kailee Travis, writer and communications assistant.