(Credit: Robina Weermeijer/Unsplash) Becoming a heart transplant patient is no small feat. Not only are waitlist times lengthy with no guaranteed end, but the actual transplant procedure is one of the riskiest surgeries performed today. After surgery, there’s the potential for the patient’s body to reject its new organ thanks to antigen discrepancies.

But what if doctors could reduce wait times and the odds of rejection by having a heart custom printed for each patient? That’s the goal of five biomedical engineers at MIT, who have found a way to 3D print functioning hearts. Each of their soft robotic hearts can be configured to a patient’s specific needs, which they hope will help pave the way for speedier and more effective transplants.

As described in the journal Soft Robotics last month, the engineers start by turning computed tomography (CT) images of a patient’s heart into a 3D computer model. They use this model to 3D print the patient’s left ventricle (AKA the heart’s main pumping chamber) and aorta (the big artery that distributes blood to other areas of the body) using a flexible photopolymer resin. Then they design soft robotic sleeves, which connect to a pneumatic system. These surround the printed left ventricle and aorta. The sleeves mimic the heart’s pumping motion by contracting and then relaxing per the engineers’ custom programming.

The engineers can tweak their 3D-printed hearts to match patients’ natural heart size and shape, as well as their blood flow and pressure. They can even implant valves that imitate those used to widen real hearts’ arteries. When they tested the 3D-printed heart with imitation blood, the engineers found that these valves produced similar results to those used in human hearts.

Beyond the 3D-printed heart’s most obvious application, it could be a valuable environment for studying heart disease. The MIT engineers can place a second sleeve around the aorta to provide additional constriction, thus mimicking aortic stenosis (a medical condition that narrows the aortic valve, requiring the heart to work harder day in and day out). Replicating conditions like this could allow researchers to tinker with novel solutions in a “sandbox” environment without using real organs.

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