Bioprinter Community Project Night

Come join our ongoing BioPrinter community project!

Did you know you can print live cells from an inkjet printer? Companies like Organovo are developing ways to 3D print human tissues and organs. But the basic technologies are so accessible that we wanted to play around with them ourselves.

We've built our own functioning bioprinter from a couple of old CD drives, an inkjet cartridge, and an Arduino. We probably won't be printing human organs any time soon, but how about printing a leaf from plant cells? Or add a BlueRay laser to turn it into a miniature laser cutter to print "lab-on-a-chip" microfluidic devices. The possibilities are endless - it all depends where you want to take it!

Our community projects are open to anyone, and are driven entirely by whoever wants to show up and participate. This is a great opportunity to come check out BioCurious, and jump into some of the projects going on.

This project has something for everyone, whether it's hardware hacking. programming, Arduinos, microfluidics, synthetic biology, plant biology, cell culturing, tissue engineering - you name it! Everyone has something to learn, or something to teach.

Check out the progress we've made so far in our BioPrinter instructable:
http://www.instructables.com/id/DIY-BioPrinter/

We'll try to give a brief intro to the project at the start of the meeting for any new visitors. This is a hacking meeting, so bring your favorite tools: laptop, camera, soldering iron etc. Younger kids must be accompanied by an adult, thanks.