Bin Duan
University of Nebraska Medical Center, NE·Biomedical Engineering
Two different problems run through this work: how to build large pieces of living human tissue with a 3D printer, and how to make safer pain drugs for cancer patients. The first is an engineering challenge in making tissues big enough to matter for medicine without killing the cells inside them.
- Fields
Biomedical Engineering
Pharmacology
Engineering
- Topics
3D bioprinting
embedded bioprinting
support bath
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Jul 2027
What they work on
- Identify how cells are damaged during embedded 3D bioprinting, both inside the printing nozzle and at the cell level, using mechanics modeling and experiments.
- Determine how heating and cooling the support bath material, added between printed sections to adjust its flow, damages living cells, using numerical simulation and experiments to optimize conditions.
- Test whether embedded section-by-section bioprinting can produce human tissue constructs longer than 20 mm with over 80% of cells surviving.
- Design and synthesize flupirtine analogues that activate Kv7.2/7.3 potassium channels, which quiet overactive nerves, but cannot form the breakdown products that damage the liver.
- Measure how well new flupirtine analogues relieve chemotherapy-induced nerve pain in short-term and long-term mouse models, using pain behavior tests.
More about the research
The second is a chemistry and pharmacology challenge: rescuing an effective pain drug that was withdrawn because it could harm the liver.
Why it matters
Large, living printed tissues could eventually support rebuilding full-scale human tissues and organs for biomedical use. Separately, cancer patients often suffer nerve pain from chemotherapy that current drugs treat poorly; liver-safe flupirtine analogues could offer non-opioid pain relief for them and possibly for other pain conditions.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Naoto Hoshi
University of California-Irvine, CA·Pharmacology
Identify potent compounds that stabilize the binding of Kv7 potassium channels to PIP2, a membrane lipid the channel needs, using a newly developed in silico (computer-based) screening process.
Mahmoud Ahmed
Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center, TX·Pharmacology
Develop new small-molecule inhibitors of the EphB1/2 tyrosine kinases, nerve-signaling enzymes, that are unrelated to tetracyclines, and define the structure–activity features needed for potent inhibition.
Kevin Tidgewell
University of Kentucky, KY·Pharmacology
Isolate bioactive compounds from Cameroonian medicinal plants such as Paullinia pinnata by fractionating extracts and testing each fraction for binding to sigma-2/TMEM97, a calcium-regulating protein linked to pain.
The school
University of Nebraska Medical Center: 20 labs on PI Pages, $657M a year on research, 82 research doctorates a year.
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