Research engineers have done what they do best – pinched ideas from nature to use in their own high-tech designs.

This time, researchers have adapted the way that nature reinforces weak substances with fibres, and used it to advance the goal of creating replacement human body parts.

The team at QUT's Institute of Health and Biomedical Innovation is working towards a future where organ donation is unnecessary, because people can have their own spare parts custom made, cloned from their original organs and body parts.

Their latest study represents a breakthrough in 3D printing mechanically reinforced, tissue engineered constructs for the regeneration of body parts.

In an article published in Nature Communications, the team outlines how it has reinforced soft hydrogels via a 3D-printed scaffold.

It is based on the way that nature uses fibre reinforcement to turn weak structures into incredibly mechanically-robust ones.

“By bringing this natural design perspective of fibre reinforcement into the field of tissue engineering (TE), we can learn a lot about how to choose an effective combination of matrix and reinforcement structure in order to achieve composite materials with enhanced mechanical properties for engineering body parts,” said QUT’s Professor Dietmar W Hutmacher.

Hydrogels are used as a base material for the development of many biologically-engineered creations.

They are favoured because they have excellent biological properties, but the hydrogels currently available for tissue regeneration of the musculoskeletal system cannot meet the mechanical and biological requirements for successful outcomes.

The QUT team says it has found a way to reinforce these soft hydrogels via a 3D-printed scaffold structure, so that their stiffness and elasticity are close to that of cartilage tissues.

Professor Hutmacher said the team had introduced organised, high-porosity microfiber networks that are printed using a new technique called “melt electro-spinning writing”.

“We found that the stiffness of the gel/scaffold composites increased synergistically up to 54 times, compared with hydrogels or microfiber scaffolds alone,” he said.

“Computational modelling has shown that we can use these 3D-printed microfibres in different hydrogels and a large range of tissue engineering applications.”

The full research report, titled ‘Reinforcement of hydrogels using three-dimensionally printed microfibres’, is accessible here.