UT Austin Team 3D-Prints a Biomimetic Tissue Material That Filters Ions Like a Kidney and Recovers Lithium

Overview

A new type of 3D-printable material developed by researchers at The University of Texas at Austin mimics human tissue’s ability to sort and filter, allowing certain molecules to pass through while keeping others out, according to UT Austin News. The work, led by professor Manish Kumar with student Aida Fica, was published in Nature Materials under the title “Jammed interconnected bilayer emulsions as 3D-printable biological tissue mimics.”

What We Know

The material, which the researchers call jammed interconnected bilayer emulsions (JIBEs), is built by packing billions of tiny water droplets tightly together, each one wrapped in its own thin separating membrane, according to UT Austin News. The team makes the droplets through emulsification — combining two oils of different solubilities — and then densely packs them using a centrifuge, producing large, tissue-like structures in just minutes, according to UT Austin News.

According to the Nature Materials paper, JIBEs are described as “a class of tissue-like materials with macroscopic scalability, comprising billions of bilayer-separated aqueous compartments per millilitre,” and the self-assembly approach — which the authors say is adaptable to lipids and block copolymers — can produce “decilitre-scale volumes of JIBEs within minutes.” The paper reports that the bilayer-separated architecture was confirmed through cryo-EM imaging.

The researchers demonstrated that the material’s filtering behavior can be tuned: functionalizing it with the peptides gramicidin A and alamethicin produced selective ion transport, with the paper reporting monovalent-to-divalent selectivity ratios of K⁺/Na⁺ = 2.9 and K⁺/Ca²⁺ = 13.3, and the material also displayed memristive behavior — a form of dynamic electrical memory — according to Nature Materials.

Kumar, a professor in the Cockrell School of Engineering’s Fariborz Maseeh Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering and the McKetta Department of Chemical Engineering, explained the underlying principle: “Tissues can separate and transport ions and molecules; that’s how our kidneys or intestines work, taking only what they need and leaving the rest behind,” he said, according to UT Austin News.

Fica, described by the university as one of Kumar’s students who “put it all together,” said the process is meant to be broadly accessible: “This technology now offers a simple, scalable process with endless applications that could be implemented in any laboratory since it only requires basic equipment,” she said, according to UT Austin News. Kumar added an open invitation to other labs: “We encourage interested researchers to try this out, and we will heartily support anybody who would like to work in this field through visits and discussions,” according to UT Austin News.

Both UT Austin News and Tech Xplore describe a wide range of potential applications for the material: tissue and organ scaffolds for regenerative medicine, soft robotics for surgery and hazardous environments, ion-conducting systems that mimic nerve tissue, and wastewater treatment for recovering critical minerals such as lithium. The Nature Materials paper independently lists proposed uses in “separations, energy storage, neuromorphic computing, tissue engineering, drug delivery and soft robotics.”

The research was funded by the WoodNext Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Chilean National Agency for Research and Development, UT’s Center for Dynamics and Control of Materials, and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, according to UT Austin News. The Nature Materials paper also credits co-author Stephen A. Sarles of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, alongside contributors from Penn State and National Taiwan University.

What We Don’t Know

Neither the university’s release nor the journal paper gives a timeline for moving JIBEs out of the lab and into commercial or clinical use. It also remains unclear how the material performs outside controlled lab conditions — over long time periods, at larger manufacturing scale, or under the mechanical stresses soft robots and wastewater systems would impose in the field. No independent replication of the results has yet been reported.