New Matter: Inside the Minds of SLAS Scientists
New Matter: Inside the Minds of SLAS Scientists
Tomolite Bioprinter from Readily3D | New Product Award Winner with Paul Delrot and Leoni Stienne
Our guests for this episode are Readily3D Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Paul Delrot, M.Sc., Ph.D., and Sales Executive Leoni Stienne, M.Sc., to talk to us about the company's success at SLAS Europe 2023 by winning the New Product Award for the Tomolite Bioprinter!
Paul and Leoni share their experience attending their first SLAS Conference and how it felt to take home the prestigious award. Also, how researchers are using the Tomolite Bioprinter to break new grounds in research.
Key Learning Points:
- What volumetric printing is and its unique properties
- Bioprinting misconceptions
- The inspiration behind the device and its use cases
- The long-term goals to accomplish using bioprinters
Learn more about the Tomolite Bioprinter by visiting:
https://readily3d.com/bioprinter
Full transcript available on Buzzsprout.
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SLAS (Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening) is an international professional society of academic, industry and government life sciences researchers and the developers and providers of laboratory automation technology. The SLAS mission is to bring together researchers in academia, industry and government to advance life sciences discovery and technology via education, knowledge exchange and global community building.
Upcoming SLAS Events:
SLAS2025 International Conference and Exhibition
- January 25-29, 2025
- San Diego, CA, USA
SLAS Europe 2025 Conference and Exhibition
- 20-22 May 2025
- Hamburg, Germany
Hannah Rosen:
Hello everyone and welcome to New Matter, the SLAS podcast where we interview life science luminaries. I'm your host Hannah Rosen and today we are joined by Paul and Leoni of Readily 3D. Readily 3D won the SLAS Europe 2023 New Product Award for their Tomolite bioprinter. Welcome to the podcast.
Leoni Stienne:
Thank you, hello.
Paul Delrot:
Hello. Thank you.
Hannah Rosen:
So to start us off, could each of you just give us kind of a little bit about your professional backgrounds and your areas of expertise?
Paul Delrot:
Yeah, sure. So I'm Paul Delrot, the CEO of Readily 3D. I'm a physicist by training with some relevant expertise in proteomics, material sciences and microengineering. I graduated with a PhD in photonics from PFR in 2018, and I co-founded Readily 3D in 2020.
Leoni Stienne:
Thank you, Paul, and I'm Leoni. I'm the sales executive Readily 3D. Before moving to Switzerland a year and a half ago, I was working as international sales engineering industry and now since I'm here, I'm tackling the biotechnology sector. So previously I graduated from the INSA in Toulouse with the specialized masters in industrial business management. And as sales executive at Readily 3D, my mission is to accelerate the development of volumetric bioprinting market. So here we are.
Hannah Rosen:
Wonderful. Well, we're happy to have you here! To start off, I mean, congratulations on your award! How do you guys feel about winning the SLAS New product Award?
Leoni Stienne:
Really great and happy and, I’d say there’s also proudness to win the SLAS New Product Award. You know, we always say that hard work always pays off, and winning this award is also a form of compensation of such hard work, but not just us, but of all the Readily 3D team. So we are definitely grateful and happy for it.
Hannah Rosen:
So, I'm sure that winning the award was a great experience, but, you know, overall, how was Readily 3D's experience at SLAS Europe 2023? Was this your first SLAS conference?
Leoni Stienne:
Uh, yes. This year was our first SLAS conference. Actually, Paul and I, we went personally ourselves there. It was such an interesting, let's say, experience. It was a really big exhibition. We met a lot of professionals from all over Europe. It was a slice of Europe, but I would even say that there were people from all over. Well, it was pretty intensive couple of days filled with the plenary sessions and meetings, and let's say we also had some entertainment going on. That was really nice. I personally met with people coming from different sectors, from academia, government, researchers and of course the main leaders and the big companies and laboratory equipment providers. So for us, it was really enriching experience and we'll definitely come back.
Hannah Rosen:
Well, we love to hear that. So can you describe for us, you know, what is the Tomolite bioprinter?
Leoni Stienne:
Ohh so now let's jump into the tunnel light. So the Tomolite bioprinter is a really unique 3D bioprinter. Actually it is volumetric, it's what we call volumetric bioprinter. But it is also inspired from the tomography. This technology today allows biologists to print, for example, an entire solid and volume at once in less than one minute. It's quite fast, and that without impairing the cell viability. So when guaranteeing a really high result on cell viability.
Hannah Rosen:
Wow. I mean, that sounds amazing. I mean it's super fast and I've heard in the past, you know, we actually fairly recently did an episode on bioprinting, and there was a discussion of, you know, the difficulties with maintaining cell viability while 3D printing. So, you know, and this may get into a little bit about the ins and outs of volumetric bioprinting, which is something I'm not familiar with. So I'm excited to learn more about that. But how are you able to maintain the cell viability?
Paul Delrot:
Viability is excellent because it's super fast so that the cells are contained within the cartridge, if you will, during the printing process they’re out of the culture medium for a very short amount of time, first. And second is that the laser light is fairly cell friendly because it's a wavelength that is quite high, so it's not tube light, it's blue light and it doesn't affect the cell variability.
Hannah Rosen:
So can you tell us a little bit more about, you know, what, quickly, is volumetric bioprinting and how is it different from other types of bioprinting?
Paul Delrot:
Yeah. So the concept of volumetric bioprinting is to print the entire volume of a 3D bio construct all at once. It's based on photopolymerization, so you need a photopolymer, that's a polymer that can cross link when you shine it with light. And volumetric bioprinting is achieved by illuminating this photo polymer with a sequence of laser light patterns, and after a while the accumulation of light dose is going to locally cross link the photopolymer to generate the desired 3D object, which is the bioprint that you want to do. So compared to other 3D bioprinters, it's at least one order of magnitude faster and it's contactless. So there is no shear stress, no mechanical contact with the resin and the cells laden within the resin. So there is no contamination because the whole printing process happens in a glass vial that can be autoclaved before the printing process. Then the post printing viability is quite unique and really good.
Hannah Rosen:
Wow. So how is the resin excreted then? Because you said that, you know, there's no shearing. So is it not, you know, traditionally you think bioprinted, you think of like a layer by layer being put down. So how is this being excreted and shaped with the light?
Paul Delrot:
It's based on the same principles as medical topography. So, CT scanners, you know, these scanners when you go to the hospitals that turn around you to scan your body. And then mathematically, they can reconstruct what was inside your body thanks to this X-ray scans. In our device this is fairly similar, except that we know what we want to print. Instead of imaging, we print and we can compute what are the laser images project onto the rotating printing file. And thanks to that, you can precisely deposit a 3D light dose within the photopolymer that's going to cross link only the desired 3D object.
Hannah Rosen:
That, I mean that sounds like science fiction, honestly, that's amazing. So it's almost like the opposite of a CT scan. Instead of, you know, capturing the image, it's producing an object.
Leoni Stienne:
Yeah, correct. We like to say it's the reverse engineering of the CT.
Hannah Rosen:
Wow. I mean, yeah, that that's incredible. That is so cool. I won't even pretend that I completely understand the science behind it, just 'cause it's blowing my mind. It sounds amazing. So how big is the Tomolite bioprinter then?
Leoni Stienne:
Actually that is also a part of what we call that the uniqueness of the Tomolite, because the Tomolite is a pretty compact, let's say, a hardware that can definitely be placed on a table or on a bench. It's a tabletop version. So we can compare it, for example, with the, let's say, an HP printer, it's around 18 kilos.
Paul Delrot:
Footprint is 30 by 65.
Leoni Stienne:
30 by 65, it's pretty compact, but it contains a quiet complexity under the hood. We made it as suitable and user friendly as possible to the user.
Hannah Rosen:
Are there, because this is the first time I'm hearing of this concept of volumetric bioprinting, are there other volumetric bioprinters on the market, or are you guys the first ones?
Paul Delrot:
So, we are the first ones. We know that there are some research ongoing on other volumetric bioprinting techniques, but nothing commercially available at the moment I think except ours.
Leoni Stienne:
More particularly in the volumetric bioprinting with tomography technique. That is where we are really the only ones.
Hannah Rosen:
Wow. Yeah. I mean, I feel like I don't even need to ask this question now that I have coming up next. But, you know, I'd love to give you guys an opportunity to brag a bit more about this product. So, can you tell us a little bit more about what do you feel makes the Tomolite new and innovative in this bioprinting sphere?
Paul Delrot:
Well, as we discussed it's fast and contactless, so there is an excellent viability for the cells and even the organoids that can be embedded within the resin. You could scale this bioprinting technique to centimetric objects. It's innovative because you need a good mix of hardware and software engineering. You need some specific hardware to shine light very precisely and very timely onto the resin, and the projection algorithm is also fairly complex. It took us some time to design it.
Hannah Rosen:
Yeah. How, how difficult is this product to use?
Leoni Stienne:
Ohh, it's really not difficult, to the contrary, it’s quite simple even. Let's say a non expert in bioprinting could really jump in very Fast.
Hannah Rosen:
And, in terms of, you know, you mentioned the cartridges for the material for bioprinting, I'm curious to know a little bit more about those. How shelf stable are they? How much, you know, different... do they need to come to you, do you have particular cell lines that you're working with that you can offer or can people use their own cell lines to print?
Paul Delrot:
Yeah. So, it's an open platform. People can use... our users, they can synthesize their own resins and use their own cell lines. We have demonstrated that the printer works with a wide range of cell types and organoid types, and also with many different resins. You can actually, it's not only limited to bioprinting, you can also 3D print any cellular things with acrylic resins or silicon, even glass resins. And we do offer a starter kit to our users so that they can try the printer with some standard resin hydrogel. The feedback we've got is that it's fairly easy to use it, you just need to load an STL file, which is a 3D representation of the object you want to print, and then within a few clicks you can print something within 30 seconds.
Hannah Rosen:
Wow. I mean, that's just incredibly fast. And then, you know, do you have to also take into consideration then the cell culture time as well for, do the cells need to culture then within the structure that you've 3D printed?
Paul Delrot:
So, you can print directly with the cells laden in the resin. You can suspend them in the resin. Most of the time we use thermal responsive hydrogel to print, which is GelMA,and this GelMA, which is kind of gelatin, if you cool it down it's going to form a gel and you can print it in a gel state. In this way you will print with a nice cell suspension. And then to develop the structure, once you have printed it, you can just warm it up and the parts that were not crosslinked, they will liquify and you can collect the solid object, gelatinous object, with the cells embedded and you put that in a culture.
Leoni Stienne:
So, the time that it is put in the culture medium is not counted for with the printing process.
Hannah Rosen:
That’s fair, fantastic. So, you know, you mentioned organoids seemed to be a big go to for 3D printing with this. You know, what type of research would the Tomolite bioprinter be ideal for?
Leoni Stienne:
Today, let's say, there's no boundaries for research and no boundaries for, let's say, involving the research and medicine. But however, in the recent years, and as what we have in record so far, our technology of tomographic volumetric bioprinting has been used to, for example, build some functional hepatic constructs or automatically correct porous bone models. We can also think of multi material purchasable bio construct and there is even one group of researchers who has done three pancreatic cancer models. We also want to highlight that with our technology and with the Tomolite, we can achieve really high throughput and high repeatability of the bioprinting constructs, and such models could be used later on for drug development and drug discovery. And let's say, on another note, that the scalability of the volumetric bioprinting, it makes it very relevant for regenerative medicine applications.
Hannah Rosen:
Yeah, that's fantastic. I mean, do you see a future where the Tomolite could potentially be used to generate entire organs or tissues?
Paul Delrot:
Well, yes, in the long term. But uh, you know, people have claimed for a while that we were almost there. Yeah, almost ready to bioprint organs, tissues, to do bone repairs, but I think we are not yet there. There's still what we call diffusion limits to overcome, which is, if you want to build a large, living object, you need also to vascularized it, and this is fairly complex. We have the bioprinting technique that allows designing and printing these vascular network, but there are other challenges to overcome before we can bioprint something and directly implement it within a patient.
Hannah Rosen:
Yeah, it sounds to me a lot like the conversations that we keep having around artificial intelligence, where people keep saying it's right around the corner, it's right around the corner, and then the closer we get the more people realize that, oh, this is actually a lot more complicated and that benchmark keeps getting pushed back.
Leoni Stienne:
Definitely. And there's something that maybe I would like to empathize on is that we often see a lot of videos and posts of 3D printing of, let's say, an organ, a heart, or a brain, but people do not realize that this is not bioprinting, and that to print any 3D object in, let's say, I don't know, in a material that is not a gel or a soft material, it's quite easy, but to bioprinting it's not the same thing.
Hannah Rosen:
Yeah. Yeah, cause I think that a lot of times, you know, you don't think about the, like, that the cells need to be able to grow and flourish and this material that you're bioprinting, you know, it's not just, it's not the tissue. You're not just like, I think when people hear bioprinting well, sometimes your brain automatically goes to like, the tissue is just coming out of the machine.
Leoni Stienne:
Definitely, and that's why there is a like, let's say there's some kind of awareness that need to be raised around the confusion between 3D printing and 3D bioprinting.
Hannah Rosen:
Yeah. I mean, would you like to elaborate on that a little bit more? I know that, you know, you've spoken to it, but is there anything else with that confusion that you think you'd like to clear up right now?
Paul Delrot:
Well, if you 3D print an object with living cells in it, it doesn't mean that it's already an organ. It can have the shape of an organ, but it's possibly not functional, meaning that if I bioprint tendon, for instance for tendon repair, it might be a very simple structure with the correct cell lines and so on. But I still need to make it functional before I implant it, so I will need to, let's say, stretch it many cycles to make sure it has the right mechanical properties to be implanted directly within a body.
Hannah Rosen:
Yeah, I think that's a great point. If people came to you and asked, you know, well I already have the ability to create organoids, why should I create them through 3D printing? You know, what would you say to those people?
Paul Delrot:
Well, when you develop the organoids, we heard that there is an issue with the viability. So you might have some variance in the size and the shape of the organoids, and even their function in the end. So, if you were to bioprint let's say, the scaffold around the organoid, you might see better reproducibility in their growth and function.
Hannah Rosen:
Yeah, great. So, it sounds like this is great, especially you had mentioned high throughput, because you're getting a lot more consistency with the 3D bioprinting.
Leoni Stienne:
Right.
Hannah Rosen:
Are there any disadvantages to using the Tomolite volumetric bioprinting system?
Paul Delrot:
On the current device, there is still a bit of manual labor that you need to to do to collect the parts that were printed, and we are working on that. We are working on ways to further automate the device to not have any manual labor. And also, there is an upper limit in the cell concentration that you can print because cells, they tend to scatter light, and if you print with a very high cell concentration you will see a lot of light scattering, which is going to have a detrimental effect on the printing. Again, we are working on that. We have different ways to improve the performance with the high cell concentrations and almost there also to roll out these add-ons on the market.
Hannah Rosen:
This is a brand new way of bioprinting. What inspired you to come up with volumetric bioprinting and to create the Tomolite bioprint?
Paul Delrot:
Well, we need to come back to my PhD studies; that was a while ago. We were looking for a way to avoid layer by layer 3D printing because it has many disadvantages. As we said, you have some mechanical shear stress, the resin is exposed to the atmosphere when printing, it's slow. And then we were looking for a way to make it faster and safer for the resin and what's inside the resin. And we just had an aha moment by, we had a lecture in image processing which was dealing with the CT scanners actually, and we just connected the dots to make these tomographic illumination available for volumetric bioprinting.
Hannah Rosen:
Well, I mean, how long did it take you to figure out how to do this?
Paul Delrot:
Well, actually it was quite fast to get working on the idea like, it's what you call Friday afternoon experiment. At the beginning, we struggled a bit with the resins that you need to bioprint because we were not experts in polymer synthesis. But it was quite fast to get something working, at least in the lab, but then to get a standalone prototype took us six months about, and then you need to certify the device and so on. So it took a year or so to get a certified standalone product.
Hannah Rosen:
Wow. I mean, that's so fast. I was like, when you describe this technology, I'm like, thinking you guys spent like a decade on trying to develop this, and you just had the idea and boom, you did it. That's amazing. Very impressive. So, you know, I mean, it took you a year to create the product. What are you looking forward to accomplishing in the next year with the Tomolite?
Leoni Stienne:
First of all, what we look forward to accomplish, let's say from now until next year, is to mainly spread the word as much as possible that an innovative technologies such as the Tomolite already exist and is ready to be used on the market, and that is a real game changer in the world of bioprinting for sure. So, I think that our best accomplishment and reward would be to see the Tomolite to be fully exploited and put to good use in the hands of the researchers. But well, as you know, when we are, let's say today and in the technology field and we are talking about an innovation, of course there are a lot of challenges that face us and one of the main challenges today is that we are aware that there's always a race to evolution and to competition, and that we need to keep up with, so we need to be completely transparent. And as Paul previously said just before that, we do have some new ideas cooking in our R&D labs and we do have other ideas to improve the Tomolite that we cannot start cheering for the moment, but I'd like to send out a shout out to everyone who's listening to us today to follow us on social media, LinkedIn, Twitter X, and they stay up to date with our latest updates and news and more particularly our new product launch that will be coming by next year.
Hannah Rosen:
Fantastic. Well, that kind of leads me into my next question, and it sounds like maybe you're not ready to talk about it yet, but I am wondering, you know, what are the long-term goals at Readily 3D?
Leoni Stienne:
Well, we do like to also see the big picture as well. But let's say that what we can say today is that the Tomolite is already in use in several R&D labs all around the world. We also have more than a dozen of papers that has been published with achieved results and also with proof of cell viability. So, to resume today we have a product that is the Tomolite, our volumetric 3D bioprinter that is designed to be the most organoid and cell friendly technique that we know of today, and we aim that one day it would be leveraged as a key instrument for researchers to use as an alternative to animal testing. It can be, for example, for drug discovery or for evolving your medicine and regenerative medicine applications, right?
Hannah Rosen:
So, if there is a researcher out there listening to this podcast right now and they are hooked, they’re in, they're all in on the Tomolite, what would they need to know before they're able to kind of get started using the Tomolite bioprinter?
Paul Delrot:
Well, there's not much to know, they can just contact us for a live demo. It's fairly easy to demonstrate how the device works online. As I said, we can start using the printer without prior knowledge of how 3D bioprinting or 3D printing, because all you need to do is to import in our software, an STL file, which is a 3D object of what you want to print, and then in a few clicks you can just print it with our standard resin.
Leoni Stienne:
So to sum up on that, I would like to ensure to everyone not to be, let's say, scared to jump in the bioprinting. It's a very user friendly and it's very intuitive and easy to use.
Hannah Rosen:
Wonderful. Well, before we conclude our podcast for today, is there anything else that you would like to add or let people know about the Tomolite or Readily 3D?
Paul Delrot:
Well, we would be on the road, so if people are interested in learning more about volumetric bioprinting and the Tomolite, I'm sure we'll meet during the different trade shows that we plan to attend within the next few months.
Leoni Stienne:
And they can also, for any question or request for information, feel free to get in touch and ask us something.
Hannah Rosen:
Wonderful. Well, Paul, Leonie, thank you both so much for taking the time out of your day to sit down and tell me about the Tomolite. Like I said, my mind is blown. I am so excited by this new technology and I'm sure our listeners are too. And so I'm just really looking forward to seeing where you guys go with this technology and seeing Readily 3D at our future SLAS events.
