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July 17, 2025

Just as the invention of the movable-type printing press in the fifteenth century drove knowledge transfer to warp speed, three-dimensional printing of human and animal tissues is transforming health care.

UVic engineering professor Stephanie Willerth is at the front of this 21^st-century renaissance.

She began engineering tissue as a graduate student in the early 2000s. In 2016, her lab at UVic was the second in the world to install the Aspect Biosystems RX1 bioprinter and the first to use this novel system to print human stem cell-derived three-dimensional tissues. Recently, she received to develop a better bioink for printing cardiac tissue.

Willerth has long focused on developing and using bioinks: stem cells plus growth factors and biomaterials that provide nourishment and spark their growth into specific cell types. Using a three-dimensional printer, she then lays down the cell mixture layer by layer. The resulting 3D tissue can replicate the complexity of native tissues — even being conductive in the case of brain or heart tissue — making them an important tool for drug discovery, disease and biological research, and regenerative medicine.

Willerth’s co-investigator on HeartPrint, the new project, is Zachary Laksman, a cardiac electrophysiologist who works at the intersection of research and clinic.

“HeartPrint,” Willerth says, “will use both genomics and functional studies to ensure that the printed tissues reach a maturation state equal to, or exceeding, the current-best manually engineered heart tissues. To develop the bioink for heart muscle cells, we’ll work with cell lines that Laksma derived from his own patients, people with specific cardiac problems.”

Willerth intends that this multi-disciplinary academic-clinic effort will overcome the limitations of animal cells and two-dimensional human cell cultures, which are unreliable for drug testing. Her start-up company, Axolotl Biosciences, makes personalized tissue models for drug screening and will drive commercial potential of HeartPrint’s products.

“What’s great about these collaborations,” says Willerth, “is that if we see something that’s effective, it can go into the clinic very quickly. We could get drugs into patients in the next few years.”

Rachel Goldsworthy