3D printing the first ever biomimetic tongue surface

 


For the first time, scientists used 3D printing to create synthetic soft surfaces with tongue-like textures.  This opens up new opportunities for testing the oral processing properties of food, nutritional technologies, pharmaceuticals, and dry mouth treatments. 


Researchers from the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom and the University of Edinburgh in the United Kingdom have demonstrated that their printed synthetic silicone structure accurately imitates the topology, elasticity of the tongue's surface. 



How food or saliva interacts with the tongue is directly influenced by these factors, which can have an impact on mouthfeel, swallowing, speech, nutritional intake, and quality of life. 


A biomimetic tongue will make it easier for developers to screen newly designed products and speed up new development processes without having to conduct costly and time-consuming human trials in the early stages. 


A biomimetic tongue could also be used in a variety of ways to fight adulteration in food and other drugs that are taken orally, whether textural characteristics are the determining factors or not, and it could save a lot of money


The tongue's complex biological surface has made artificial replication challenging. As a result, it has been challenging to develop and test effective, long-lasting treatments for dry mouth syndrome, which affects 30% of older people and 10% of the general population. 


The study's lead author, Dr E FR E N, conducted this research while working as a postdoctoral fellow at Leeds' School of Food Science and Nutrition. He declared, "Replicating a typical human tongue's surface presents unique architectural challenges ". The hundreds of tiny bud-like structures known as papillae give the tongue its characteristically rough texture. These papillae, when combined with the tissue's softness, create a mechanically complicated landscape. "We concentrated on the most anterior dorsal part of the tongue, where some of these papillae have taste receptors while many of them require such receptors," reads the article. Both kinds of papillae provide the necessary mechanical friction for the mouth to process food, resulting in a pleasant mouthfeel and sufficient lubrication for swallowing when saliva is present. The mission statement for the project states, "We aimed to replicate these mechanically relevant characteristics of the human tongue on a surface that is easy to use in the lab to replicate oral processing conditions". The study was recently published in the ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces journal. It brought together unique expertise in dentistry, mechanical engineering, soft matter physics, food colloid science, and computer science


A team of researchers from the University of Edinburgh and Leeds University has created a 3D-printed model of the human tongue. They used computer simulations and mathematical modelling to create an artificial surface that mimics the texture of a human tongue's papillae, or papilla.


A silicone surface that can be 3D printed has been developed by engineers at Leeds University to imitate the mechanical performance of the human tongue. The biomimetic tongue surface may also be a one-of-a-kind mechanical tool for textural characteristics-based counterfeit food and beverage detection



"For a quantitative understanding of how fluids interact within the oral cavity, we believe that fabricating a synthetic surface with relevant properties that mimics the intricate architectural features and, more importantly, the lubricating performance of the human tongue is essential". 


"Based on textural characteristics, this biomimetic tongue surface could also serve as a one-of-a-kind mechanical tool to assist in detecting counterfeit food and high-value beverages, which is a global concern and can aid in ensuring food safety ". 


"In the end, our hope is that the surface we created can help us understand how the biomechanics of the tongue support the fundamentals of human feeding and speech"

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