Recent Highlights

CNN

When we'll be able to 3D-print organs and who will be able to afford them

What if doctors could just print a kidney, using cells from the patient, instead of having to find a donor match and hope the patient's body doesn't reject the transplanted kidney? More...

Logo

Top collegiate inventors awarded 2021 Lemelson-MIT Student Prize

The Wyss' Nicole Black has been named one of this year's winners for her PhonoGraft technology, which is a tunable, biomimetic eardrum graft that could help improve healing and hearing outcomes in tympanic membrane repair surgeries. Awarded on World IP Day, the prize recognizes the pivotal role invention has played over the last year. More...

Lewis Lab Logo

 

Lewis Lab members have designed and made hundreds of face shields for frontline medical workers 

When the coronavirus pandemic forced Harvard University to ramp down almost all on-site operations, members of the Wyss Institute community refocused their teams, and formed new ones, in order to fight COVID-19 on its multiple fronts. More...

logo

3D-printed hearts with 'beating' tissue could ease organ donor shortage

Scientists at Harvard’s Wyss Institute say they are one step closer to that reality. In lab experiments, they have developed a new technique that uses living human cells to "print" functional heart tissue for an artificial heart — an innovation that could save thousands of lives. More...

Cooper

Vascular tree sculpture highlighted at Cooper Hewitt’s Wyss Institute Selects exhibit

Dr. Sanlin Robinson constructed a vascular tree sculpture that emulates the vascular networks found in our bodies and in bioprinted tissues produced by the Lewis Lab. This sculpture is currently on display through March 2020, as part of the Wyss Institute Selects exhibit at the Cooper Hewitt museum in New York City. More...

logo

Perovskite LEDs begin to shine

In solar cells, the cheap, easy to make materials called perovskites are adept at turning photons into electricity. Now, perovskites are turning the tables, converting electrons into light with an efficiency on par with that of the commercial organic light emitting diodes (LEDs) found in cellphones and flat screen TVs. And in a glimpse of how they might one day be harnessed, Lewis and her collaborators reported in Science Advances a new approach for patterning perovskites for use in full color displays via 3D printing. More...

JPEG

Lewis honored by inclusion in the Ferragamo Museum Exhibit on Sustainable Thinking

The Names Dress (www.namesdress.com) is a 3D printed conceptual art piece that celebrates and brings awareness to the accomplishments of women in STEAM fields. The dress is made up of over 300 names of current and historic women in STEAM fields and is on display at the Ferragamo Museum’s Sustainable Thinking” exhibition from April 12, 2019 through March 8, 2020. To create the dress, each name was rendered and printed in 3D using compostable bio-plastic in a method creating zero waste. The names were then fused together to form the fabric of the dress. The main purposes of the dress are to serve as a tribute to women, known and unknown, working in STEAM and as an art piece made of sustainable material that raises awareness and ignites conversations on the role of women in these fields. 

Science Robotics

Science Robotics names our 3D liquid crystal elastomers one of “Ten Robotics Technologies of the Year”  

In this Editorial, we identify 10 exciting robotics developments and technologies, ranging from original research that may change the future of robotics to commercial products.More...

 

TRAILBLAZERS WITH

WALTER ISAACSON 

 

Printers: What Will We Print Next?

We’ve come a long way from the printing press. For a technology that started as a vehicle for the mass production and distribution of text, we’ve ventured well beyond text or even paper altogether. Can we eventually print living things? More..

jpeg

Watch this new device print using sound waves innovation

Harvard scientists delevop a printing technique that could impact a slew of industries, from biopharmaceuticals to food and cosmetics. More...

thumbnail

Ryan Truby named as 2018 Schmidt Science Fellow

Eric And Wendy Schmidt Announce First Class Of Schmidt Science Fellows More...

Robotic fingers get touchy-feely

3D-printed sensors provide feedback about objects held by an artificial hand.. More...

Lewis Bioteam featured on BBC

... At Harvard University, bioengineers are growing parts of functioning kidneys in small chips using a form of 3D printing. Jennifer Lewis' lab is doing this to learn how kidneys function and explore the possible therapeutic applications of the mini-kidneys-in-a-chip. Roland Pease visits the team at work. More...

  Lush Prize

Lewis Bioprinting Team wins the 2017 Lush Science Prize

The Lush Prize winners for 2017 have been announced! Every year, we honor some of the most progressive work in eliminating animal testing, particularly in the area of toxicology research, with the Lush Prize. This annual event awards a £250,000 (about $330,000 USD) prize fund to scientists, campaigners and young researchers across five categories. More...

WSJ Logo

Get Ready for 3-D Printed Everything

Today it's mostly prototypes and plastic trinkets. But additive manufacturing - aka 3-D printing - is poised to produce everything from airplane parts and auto bodies to sneaker soles and human organs. More...

Voxel8: 3D printing mixes materials

The machine sitting on the counter of a lab in Massachusetts is the size and shape of an ordinary desktop printer, but it looks like it has been crossed with a juke box. There's no place for paper, and the moving arm beneath the transparent orange cover doesn't pluck out a record for the turntable. Instead, it contains a pair of dispensing heads: one that extrudes a thin layer of thermoplastic from a spool, and another that deposits silver that will become a conductive wire. Both heads move back and forth across a plate and slowly build up a 3D object, layer by layer. More...

Link to online article

Harvard College student combines art, science, and public service

On the walls of Mather House hangs a painting by one of its residents. Julia Grotto ’17 has layered acrylic paint onto paper, transforming the exterior of the House’s Brutalist architecture in an intricate play of light and shadow. More...

Octobot

The Octobot is selected by Popular Science as one of “the 10 best science images, videos, and visualizations of the year"

Soft robots—ones made entirely out of squishy materials—are about to take over. They're theoretically safer and more resilient than metallic mechanoids, but scientists haven't quite figured out practical ways to make every part of a robot mushy. Octobot is a step (or eight) in the right direction: it's entirely soft, powered by chemical reactions that push fluid and gas into its limbs. More...

Materials Today

Printing cellular structures in a controllable way

Scientists have developed a highly porous ceramic foam ink containing a mixture of alumina particles, water and air that can be patterned in 3D to design constructs similar to natural structures and which possess superior mechanical properties. More...

Meet the World’s First Completely Soft Robot

The “octobot” is a squishy little robot that fits in the palm of your hand and looks like something in a goody bag from a child’s birthday party. But despite its quirky name and diminutive size, this bot represents an astonishing advance in robotics. More...

Building Toward a Kidney

Lewis’s work using 3-D printing technology to fabricate human tissues—“bioprinting,” she calls it—is increasingly important in the emerging field of tissue engineering, a science whose ultimate aspiration is to build three-dimensional tissues and entire organs that can repair or replace a patient’s damaged liver, or heart—or kidney.  More...

Medicine: An End to Animal Testing?

The first-ever fully 3D-printed “heart-on-a-chip” was developed by Harvard researchers this year, offering a synthetic alternative for the living tissue that is currently used in animal testing. More...

4D-printed structure changes shape when placed in water

Wyss, SEAS researchers create shape-shifting architectures that mimic plant movements.  More...


The Promise of Printing

Machines that deposit cell-laden inks are constructing tissues and organs, one layer at a time.  More...

3-D printer builds heart-on-a-chip device

Harvard University researchers may be one step closer to replacing lab rats with lab-grown organ tissue thanks to inky chemistry and three-dimensional printing. More...

3-D-Printed Kidney Parts Just Got Closer to Reality

Using 3-D printing, scientists have created tiny, intricate tubes that work like key components of real kidneys.  More...

The Lancet Technology: 3D printing for instruments, models, and organs?

3D printing, or additive manufacturing, has now reached the consumer market. This process creates three-dimensional objects under computer control using successive layers of material. More...

The Path to Printed Body Parts

Scientists are making steady progress toward 3-D printed tissues and organs.  More...

Lewis Lab work on multi material 3D printing featured in review in Science magazine

Three-dimensional (3D) printing, known more formally as additive manufacturing, has become the focus of media and public attention in recent years as the decades old technology has at last approached the performance necessary for direct production of end-use devices. More...

Pneumatic octopus is first soft, solo robot

US engineers have built the first ever self-contained, completely soft robot - in the shape of a small octopus. More...

Taking printing to the fourth dimension

3-D printing has come a long way since it was first developed more than thirty years ago. Now, a team of Harvard scientists have created 4D-printed structures that are capable of changing shape.  More...

2015 and Earlier

Lewis elected as a NAI Fellow

Donald Ingber and Jennifer Lewis have been recognized as distinguished American inventors whose technologies are poised to benefit society. More...

Collegiate Inventors Competition Announces 2015 Graduate and Undergraduate Winners

Congratulations to David Kolesky, Winner of the 2015 Collegiate Inventors Competition for his invention of 3D Bioprinting Vascularized Human Tissue More...

Printed spider webs get tough

Using a 3D printer, researchers have created spider-web analogues out of elastic polymer threads and tweaked their architectures to maximize the webs' strength. More...

Fast Company's Most Creative People in Business 2015

At January’s Consumer Electronics Show, Jennifer Lewis, a biological engineering professor at Harvard with 10 patents to her name, unveiled a potentially revolutionary new technology: the world’s first 3-D printer capable of spitting out fully functional electronics. More...

Print Your Heart Out

Jennifer A. Lewis of Harvard University has adopted a different approach to the vasculature problem. Her group is using a sacrificial ink to print smaller channels, tens to hundreds of micrometers in diameter. More...

Microcapsules collect carbon dioxide

Microcapsules containing a liquid carbonate solvent could capture carbon dioxide from power plants more efficiently than existing methods. More...

2014-in-Materials: Printing Body Parts

Researchers showed they could use a 3-D printer to make blood vessels, overcoming a major hurdle to growing complete human organs that could serve as replacements in sick people. More...

3D Bioprinting: One of Discover's Top 100 Science Stories of 2014

Could tomorrow's surgeons create customized replacement tissue for patients just by hitting print? Two teams of Harvard bioengineers made big strides toward that goal in 2014, reporting two new 3-D-printing methods that help construct rudimentary blood vessels. More...

Foreign Policy's 100 Leading Global Thinkers

To date, labs experimenting with 3-D printing have been limited by the materials at their disposal.  After all, there is only so much you can make out of plastic.  Enter Jennifer Lewis: With her team at Harvard University's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Lewis is on the cutting edge of creating new "ink" materials that will revolutionize the functionality of 3-D prints.  More...

Print Thyself: How 3-D Printing is Revolutionizing Medicine

In February, Lewis and a graduate student, David Kolesky, and other members of their research group published a paper in Advanced Materials describing a potential way to keep large masses of cells thriving. With a customized 3-D printer, they were able to print a protein matrix and living cell types in a pattern similar to what is found in the body.  More...

Just Press Print

A team of Harvard University researchers has printed living tissue interlaced with blood vessels—a crucial step toward one day transplanting human organs printed from a patient’s own cells. “That’s the ultimate goal of 3-D bio-printing,” says Jennifer Lewis, who led the research. “We are many years away from achieving this goal.”  More...

50 on Fire Finalist

3D printing is all the rage, but Jennifer Lewis and her team have taken it to a whole new level. This year, they developed new classes of special inks with potential application as printed electronics, waveguides, and 3D scaffolds and microvascular architectures for cell culture and tissue engineering. In other words: they’re one step closer to 3D printing a kidney. To date, the team has successfully printed human tissues, including rudimentary blood vessels.  More...

3-D Printing Steps Toward Industry

“We’ve turned printing on its head,” Lewis said. “That opens up a lot of material innovation space.” She believes a materials-centric approach to 3-D printing will pave the way to its broader adoption in industry in the next five to 10 years. More...

An introduction to rebuilding the body

Just beyond the leading edge of biomedical research lie the medical tools of the future, where smart tattoos monitor changes in glucose levels, living tissues and organs are printed on demand, and implantable electrodes connect the nervous system to prosthetic limbs. More...

Microscale 3-D Printing

Despite the excitement that 3-D printing has generated, its capabilities remain rather limited. It can be used to make complex shapes, but most commonly only out of plastics. Even manufacturers using an advanced version of the technology known as additive manufacturing typically have expanded the material palette only to a few types of metal alloys. But what if 3-D printers could use a wide assortment of different materials, from living cells to semiconductors, mixing and matching the “inks” with precision? More...

Artificial Organs May Finally Get a Blood Supply

Using a custom-built four-head 3-D printer and a “disappearing” ink, materials scientist Jennifer Lewis and her team created a patch of tissue containing skin cells and biological structural material interwoven with blood-vessel-like structures. More...

Printing Batteries

By making the basic building blocks of batteries out of ink, Harvard materials scientist Jennifer Lewis is laying the groundwork for lithium-ion batteries and other high-performing electronics that can be produced with 3-D printers. More...

Our Future With 3D Printers: 7 Disrupted Industries

Designing and 3D printing electronics with optimal shape and styling properties will be common. 3D printing is ideal for the complex geometric features needed in small, compact electronic circuit boards that use multiple materials ranging from low conductivity plastics to high conductivity metal materials. A team of researchers from Harvard University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has already fabricated tiny batteries using 3D printing. The batteries can power insect-sized robots and hundreds of other minuscule devices. More...

Organs on Demand

Harvard’s Lewis, who serves as the university’s Hansjörg Wyss Professor of Biologically Inspired Engineering, is interrogating this problem using a customized, high-resolution 3-D printer that can form microchannels in biocompatible gels. “We can print hydrogel materials down at the micron-length scale, smaller than other groups can print anything,” Lewis says. The smallest microvascular channels her group has been able to print are around 10 microns in diameter. More...

Micro Batteries

Rechargeable lithium ion batteries the size of a grain of sand, with nodes produced by a 3D printer, could power biomedical implants, coin-size sensors, and other tiny electronics. More...

Printing Tiny Batteries

3D printing can now be used to print lithium-ion microbatteries the size of a grain of sand. The printed microbatteries could supply electricity to tiny devices in fields from medicine to communications, including many that have lingered on lab benches for lack of a battery small enough to fit the device, yet provide enough stored energy to power them. More...

Featured in Nature News, The Wall Street Journal, BusinessweekScientific AmericanForbes, Discovery News, USA Today, Engadget, ScienceDailyNano Werk

 

9 Materials That Will Change The Future of Manufacturing

The future of manufacturing depends on a number of technological breakthroughs in robotics, sensors and high-performance computing, to name a few. But nothing will impact how things are made, and what they are capable of, more than the materials manufacturers use to make those things. New materials change both the manufacturing process and the end result. More...

http://www.electroninks.com/

 

Into the Fold

To create a 3-D structure, researchers in Illinois start by printing slow-drying ink of metal or ceramic particles into flat sheets (left). Such sheets can be folded and refolded into 3-D shapes as long as the ink does not dry completely. More...

Collegiate Inventors Competition

Brett Walker won second prize in the Collegiate Inventors Competition for his pioneering work on reactive silver inks. More...

Particle-free silver ink prints small, high-performance electronics

Electronics printed on low-cost, flexible materials hold promise for antennas, batteries, sensors, solar energy, wearable devices and more. Most conductive inks rely on tiny metal particles suspended in the ink. The new ink is a transparent solution of silver acetate and ammonia. The silver remains dissolved in the solution until it is printed, and the liquid evaporates, yielding conductive features. More...

How to: Make silver ink that conducts electricity

This custom silver ink, developed by materials researchers at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, allows you to draw working circuits out on paper. It's extremely cool, and the video shows you step-by-step how they make it. Bonus: This ink provides an actual reason to use cursive. More...

Featured in C&EN's Science is Awesome: Top 10 Video Clips of the Year

Small 3D Antennas

While most electronic components benefit from decreased size, antennas - whether in a cell phone or on an aircraft - suffer limitations in gain, efficiency, system range, and bandwidth when their size is reduced below a quarter-wavelength. "Omnidirectional printing of metallic nanoparticle inks offers an attractive alternative for meeting the demanding form factors of 3D electrically small antennas (ESAs)," stated Jennifer A. Lewis, the Hans Thurnauer Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and director of the Frederick Seitz Materials Research Laboratory at Illinois. More...

 

Printed Origami Structures

Origami, the traditional paper art, is a folding technique in which elegant and complex three-dimensional (3D) objects are produced from planar sheets. Significant scientific and technological interest in origami assembly methods have emerged due to the recognition that nature utilizes controlled folding and unfolding schemes to produce intricate architectures ranging from proteins to plants. More...

 

NewScientist Tech - Blingtronics: Diamonds are a geek's best friend

The most marketable bling technology might be wrapped into something that you take with you everywhere. It could transform your favourite gadgets, including cellphones and music players - by incorporating them into your clothing. "Rather than carrying your iPod, the whole electronic system could be embedded in your jacket," says Jennifer Lewis, a materials scientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. More...

 

Technology Review: Light, Tough Origami Ceramics

A new way of printing and folding ceramic and metal lattices into miniature structures could lead to novel lightweight engineering structures. The technique involves making latticed sheets from ceramic ink, then folding and heating these sheets to create intricate shapes. The method could be used to make lightweight parts for aerospace applications, complex scaffolds for tissue engineering, and filters and catalysts for industrial chemical production. More...

 

PopSci: Tiny Titanium Origami Highlights New Method Of Micro-Construction

While three-dimensional printing has come a long way, engineers still struggle with fabricating objects smaller than a quarter. In those small structures, the upper layers crush and distort the weak lower ones. To solve this problem, researchers at the University of Illinois have come up with a novel solution: print out a flat sheet, and then fold it, origami style, into the desired shape. Creating this origami crane as proof of concept, the researchers have hit upon a technique that could produce any number of microscopic medical or mechanical devices through folding, rather than layered printing. More...

Emerging Themes in Soft Matter: Responsive and Active Soft Materials

Biomimetic microvascular networks with complex architectures are embedded in epoxy matrices using direct-write assembly. Fluid transport in multi-generation bifurcating channels is systematically investigated and maximum flow efficiency is found to occur when Murray's law is obeyed. More...

 

Self-healing Networks Mimic Nature

A new method to make complex microvascular networks could revolutionise tissue engineering, claim US scientists. Nature is full of examples of vascular networks, such as blood vessels in the human body and veins in leaves that transport fluid or other substances to promote growth and healing. Jennifer Lewis at the University of Illinois and colleagues have developed a technique to mimic these networks on a polymer matrix. The polymer system makes it capable of self healing, allowing any cracks or tears to be healed making it stronger and more durable than previous attempts. More...

Liquid Driven Folding

Fabrication of 3D electronic structures in the micrometer-to-millimeter range is extremely challenging due to the inherently 2D nature of most conventional wafer-based fabrication methods. Self-assembly, and the related method of self-folding of planar patterned membranes, provide a promising means to solve this problem. Here, we investigate self-assembly processes driven by wetting interactions to shape the contour of a functional, nonplanar photovoltaic (PV) device. A mechanics model based on the theory of thin plates is developed to identify the critical conditions for self-folding of different 2D geometrical shapes. This strategy is demonstrated for specifically designed millimeter-scale silicon objects, which are self-assembled into spherical, and other 3D shapes and integrated into fully functional light-trapping PV devices. The resulting 3D devices offer a promising way to efficiently harvest solar energy in thin cells using concentrator microarrays that function without active light tracking systems. More...

 

Science: Exploiting Evaporation

There are many approaches available to pattern soft materials such as colloidal films, but they often require multiple processing steps and allow deposition of only a few particle layers. A method called evaporative lithography overcomes these limitations, and Harris et al. now show that the method also enables the creation of patterns from binary mixtures of particles. More...

Silk Fibroin Waveguides: Biocompatible Silk Printed Optical Waveguides

The cover shows an artistic rendition that merges silk and fiber optics. Supercontinuum white light is guided through a glass optical fiber that surrounds and illuminates silkworm cocoons.  More...

 

Nature Materials: Printing in all directions

Directing ink through a cylindrical nozzle onto a substrate is a promising method for printing metallic electrodes for electronic devices. Until now, however, the technique has had several restrictions: nozzle clogging, relatively large features (~100 um) and deposition that is constrained to the x–yplane. Jennifer A. Lewis and co-workers have created highly concentrated silver nanoparticle inks that can be printed in three dimensions in air without clogging. More...

New Silver-based Nanoparticle Ink Could Lead to Better Flexible Printed Electronics

A new ink developed by researchers at the University of Illinois allows them to write their own silver linings.

The ink, composed of silver nanoparticles, can be used in electronic and optoelectronic applications to create flexible, stretchable and spanning microelectrodes that carry signals from one circuit element to another. More...

Read the original Science article here.

 

Technology Review: A Nanoparticle Glue Gun

Flexible printed electronics and solar-cell arrays promise to be cheaper and more versatile than their rigid counterparts. But their components still need to be linked by tiny metal electrodes in order to get electrons flowing through a device. A new silver-nanoparticle ink could be just the thing for printing high-performance electrical connections for flexible devices. More...

Solar cells go round the bend

With high oil prices sparking a surge of interest in alternative energy sources, solar cells have become the subject of intense research. Much of this effort focuses on finding new designs that open up fresh applications. More...

 

New York Times: A New Flexibility With Thin Solar Cells

Photovoltaic cells, the basic building blocks of solar panels, are more efficient and less costly than ever. But manipulating cells (which are usually made of semiconductor materials) and incorporating them into different panel designs is not necessarily easy. More...

 

Material: Heal Thyself

In a display of nature's restorative powers, human skin has the ability to heal itself when cut. Now, researchers at the University of Illinois have invented materials that do the same thing. More...

Sol-gel Inks Produce Complex Shapes With Nanoscale Features

New sol-gel inks developed by researchers at the University of Illinois can be printed into patterns to producage three-dimensional structures of metal oxides with nanoscale features. More...

Self-Healing Plastic

ScienCentral News and WBKO - Even high tech machines like the space shuttle need the occasional repair. But what if materials like plastics could repair themselves? As this ScienCentral News video reports, scientists are doing just that by imitating how our bodies work to heal small wounds. More...