Cells-in-Touch: 3D Printing in Reconstruction and Modelling of Microscopic Biological Geometries for Education and Future Research Applications

Additive manufacturing (3D printing) and computer-aided design (CAD) still have limited uptake in biomedical and bioengineering research and education, despite the significant potential of these technologies. The utility of organ-scale 3D-printed models of living structures is widely appreciated, while the workflows for microscopy data translation into tactile accessible replicas are not well developed yet. Here, we demonstrate an accessible and reproducible CAD-based methodology for generating 3D-printed scalable models of human cells cultured in vitro and imaged using conventional scanning confocal microscopy with fused deposition modeling (FDM) 3D printing. We termed this technology CiTo-3DP (Cells-in-Touch for 3D Printing). As a proof-of-concept, we created dismountable CiTo-3DP models of human epithelial, mesenchymal, and neural cells by using selectively stained nuclei and cytoskeletal components. We also provide educational and research context for the presented cellular models. In the future, the CiTo-3DP approach can be adapted to different imaging and 3D printing modalities and comprehensively present various cell types, subcellular structures, and extracellular matrices. The resulting CAD and 3D printed models could be used for a broad spectrum of education and research applications.