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CELPIP Practice Reading: Reading for Information ID: #63125 Hard 3D bioprinting of tissues: research goals

Read the following passage.

A. In 1988, a researcher named Klebe used a standard Hewlett-Packard inkjet printer to place cells on a surface. In 2003, Wilson and Boland built the first inkjet bioprinter by modifying a standard HP printer. Their machines were changed to release solutions of proteins or cells instead of ink. The Clemson University team wrote that its cell printer could arrange groups of cells to copy their positions in organs. Pioneers in the field saw such printing as a way to build living structures that might one day serve in organ transplants.

B. Later research moved from flat patterns of cells toward pieces of tissue at human scale. In 2016, a team at the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine presented an integrated tissue-organ printer. It prints cell-laden hydrogels with biodegradable polymers, while sacrificial gels hold the structure in place during printing. Scans of a patient's injury become a computer model that guides the printer's nozzles. Tiny microchannels carry nutrients into the printed tissue, because cells cannot survive more than about 100 to 200 micrometres from a supply. The team printed jaw and skull bone, cartilage and skeletal muscle.

C. In Toronto, engineers have aimed printing at burns. In 2012, a University of Toronto group built a microfluidic device that printed patterned gel sheets, and in 2018 the same group reported a handheld skin printer. The compact instrument weighs less than 0.8 kg and works a little like a tape dispenser, laying a sheet of skin cells or gel straight onto a wound. Early tests on animal wound models showed that it could deposit sheets onto inclined wound surfaces that move with breathing. In a later study of deep burns in pigs, sheets carrying cells improved healing, the return of skin cells and the growth of new blood vessels.

D. In January 2026, the United States agency ARPA-H named the teams in its PRINT program, which is worth up to $176.8 million over five years. The agency says the teams must achieve something that has so far been impossible in tissue engineering: a human-sized printed organ with all the cells and blood vessels it needs to work. One team, at Carnegie Mellon University, aims to have a printed liver ready for first trials in people within five years. Rules are also unsettled. A 2026 journal article reported that neither the FDA nor the EMA has issued guidelines written for clinical bioprinting, and it remains unclear how printing methods will affect the way such therapies are classified.

E. Not given in any of the above paragraphs.

Decide which paragraph, A to D, has the information given in each statement below. Select E if the information is not given in any of the paragraphs.

 - 1. A tool light enough to hold in one hand can spread living layers right onto a hurt part of the body.

 - 2. Within a few years of the first cell printers, doctors were using them to treat patients.

 - 3. Animal trials found the approach helped serious skin damage repair itself and form new circulation.

 - 4. The earliest attempts to print cells relied on adapting everyday machines rather than inventing new ones.

 - 5. Carnegie Mellon researchers hope to begin testing their organ in humans within about half a decade.

 - 6. The Wake Forest machine could complete tissue more quickly than older printers could.

 - 7. The EMA and the FDA have not yet offered guidance made just for printed treatments.

 - 8. The Toronto group made its device portable mainly so that treatment would cost less.

 - 9. Built-in pathways let nourishment reach cells that would otherwise be too far from it to survive.

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