Paving the Way to More Precise Tissue Engineering with the Help of Liquid Metal

Posted on January 14th, 2025 by Dr. Monica M. Bertagnolli

The ability to engineer complex biological tissues—such as the tiny air sacs inside our lungs or complex, branching blood vessels throughout our bodies—has vast potential to help us unlock fundamental biological insights, test new therapeutics, and one day even build fully functional replacement tissues or whole organs. But researchers have found it challenging to use current technologies—such as 3D printing—to produce living tissues using natural biological materials that include larger organ structures accurately constructed down to the tiny, cellular level. It has been too complex to recreate the many different tissue architectures of the human body in the lab.

A recent, NIH-supported study reported in Nature suggests a clever solution. The key is taking advantage of the natural properties of a silvery metal known as gallium, which is notable for melting at about 85 degrees Fahrenheit, below body temperature, meaning it can be melted by body temperature. The new study demonstrated the metal’s use as a molding material for generating soft biological structures complete with hollowed-out internal forms in the wide range of intricate shapes and sizes that would be needed to support the growth of larger, lifelike tissues from cells.