Bioprinting of Stable Bionic Interfaces Using Piezoresistive Hydrogel Organoelectronics.

Bionic tissues offer an exciting frontier in biomedical research by integrating biological cells with artificial electronics, such as sensors. One critical hurdle is the development of artificial electronics that can mechanically harmonize with biological tissues, ensuring a robust interface for effective strain transfer and local deformation sensing. In this study, a highly tissue-integrative, soft mechanical sensor fabricated from a composite piezoresistive hydrogel. The composite not only exhibits exceptional mechanical properties, with elongation at the point of fracture reaching up to 680%, but also maintains excellent biocompatibility across multiple cell types. Furthermore, the material exhibits bioadhesive qualities, facilitating stable cell adhesion to its surface. A unique advantage of the formulation is the compatibility with 3D bioprinting, an essential technique for fabricating stable interfaces. A multimaterial sensorized 3D bionic construct is successfully bioprinted, and it is compared to structures produced via hydrogel casting. In contrast to cast constructs, the bioprinted ones display a high (87%) cell viability, preserve differentiation ability, and structural integrity of the sensor-tissue interface throughout the tissue development duration of 10 d. With easy fabrication and effective soft tissue integration, this composite holds significant promise for various biomedical applications, including implantable electronics and organ-on-a-chip technologies.

Perfusable Biohybrid Designs for Bioprinted Skeletal Muscle Tissue.

Engineered, centimeter-scale skeletal muscle tissue (SMT) can mimic muscle pathophysiology to study development, disease, regeneration, drug response, and motion. Macroscale SMT requires perfusable channels to guarantee cell survival, and support elements to enable mechanical cell stimulation and uniaxial myofiber formation. Here, stable biohybrid designs of centimeter-scale SMT are realized via extrusion-based bioprinting of an optimized polymeric blend based on gelatin methacryloyl and sodium alginate, which can be accurately coprinted with other inks. A perfusable microchannel network is designed to functionally integrate with perfusable anchors for insertion into a maturation culture template. The results demonstrate that i) coprinted synthetic structures display highly coherent interfaces with the living tissue, ii) perfusable designs preserve cells from hypoxia all over the scaffold volume, iii) constructs can undergo passive mechanical tension during matrix remodeling, and iv) the constructs can be used to study the distribution of drugs. Extrusion-based multimaterial bioprinting with the inks and design realizes in vitro matured biohybrid SMT for biomedical applications.

Comparison Between Prognostic Classifications in De Novo Metastatic Hormone Sensitive Prostate Cancer.

BACKGROUND: The CHAARTED and LATITUDE trials demonstrated improved outcomes with docetaxel or abiraterone plus androgen deprivation therapy in metastatic hormone sensitive prostate cancer (mHSPC) using two different prognostic scores. OBJECTIVE: The aim of our study was to assess the concordance between the two scores and if these retained their prognostic value exclusively in de novo mHSPC. PATIENTS AND METHODS: De novo mHSPC patients referring to our institution were retrospectively stratified according to the CHAARTED and LATITUDE classifications: high volume/high risk (HV/HR), low-volume/low-risk (LV/LR), and HVorHR (HV/LR and LV/HR). The Kaplan-Meier method and Cox proportional-hazard models were used to estimate hazard ratios for overall survival. RESULTS: The study population included 106 patients. Concordance between the CHAARTED and LATITUDE classifications was observed in 86.8% of cases (65.1% HV/HR, 21.7% LV/LR), while 13.2% of patients fulfill the criteria of only one of the two classifications (HVorHR). When analyzed independently, the CHAARTED and LATITUDE classifications maintained their prognostic value (mOS 28.2 months in HV versus 60.9 months in LV, p = 0.006; 28.2 months in HR versus 40.6 months in LR, p = 0.017). The LR/LV population showed significantly longer mOS compared to the HR/HV group (72.6 months versus 26.3 months; p = 0.005), and to HVorHR patients (35.1 months; p = 0.003). No difference in OS was observed between HV/HR and HVorHR patients. ECOG PS ≥ 1 and patient age improved the prognostic value of the two classifications with multivariate analysis. CONCLUSIONS: Our study showed a lack of complete concordance between the CHAARTED and LATITUDE classifications. The analysis confirmed the role of these prognostic scores to stratify de novo mHSPC patients in clinical practice.