3D printing tiny human livers(newscientist.com)
newscientist.com
3D printing tiny human livers
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23419-3d-printer-makes-tiniest-human-liver-ever.html#.UgUWjGTXhcQa
8 comments
Interesting coverage in Popular Science as well [1]. They point out (as does the newscientist article) that the key to organ printing is vascularization (creating a blood supply for the organ). Once you have that conquered you should be good to go on Kidney's, Liver's, Spleen's, Heart Tissue, Etc.
[1] http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-07/how-3-d-printi...
[1] http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-07/how-3-d-printi...
>Once you have that conquered you should be good to go on Kidney's, Liver's, Spleen's, Heart Tissue, Etc.
and after that onto better kidney, better liver, better spleen ... like printing a cat-eye-style reflection layer into new human eye to increase night vision :)
and after that onto better kidney, better liver, better spleen ... like printing a cat-eye-style reflection layer into new human eye to increase night vision :)
How goes plans for manufacturing a full-size liver? A friend needs one.
I didn't have associated the idea of "printing" to a "human organ" yet. Very interesting. I wonder if, in the future, printing an organ would be easier than making it grow somehow until it gets functional for transplant.
It would be more of a hybrid of those two methods. You print the large parts (even a micron is "large") into place, then let the cells grow the small connections we cannot reliably engineer, like planting a garden. All this reminds me of that classic statement about human longevity and the lack of spare parts.
Not only that, but the compatibility can be guaranteed by seeding the cells to be printed from your own stem cells.
So yesterday I thought 3d printers were just for making blocks of shaped plastic. How has this suddenly moved on to making biological parts?
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Man, the distant future is going to be an interesting place.
One major impediment is similar to the 3D printing world - we need and rapid access at single micron levels. Right now most 3D printers get down to about 100microns. We need better.
We also need creative ways to mix cell types - your organs use many (but a finite number) of cell types dispersed in an organized way. Coming up with a clever way to use different 'inks' of cells in an organized way would be extraordinarily useful. As others have said - a primary reason is vascularization, but there are a number of cell types you'd need to worry about.
Definitely moving quickly though - we've seen pretty fast progress in lab keeping cells alive and starting to use different cell types for small structures. We can do any given manipulation. We now need to combine them to make the entire process fast, micron resolution, high viability, natural scaffoldings, with many cell types.
Futher - as this article points out, there's a LOT we can learn simply from being able to recreate and experiment on small portions of tissues and organs properly. The first results won't need to come from 'make a new liver' - but 'what does this thing in the liver do', or 'can we fix a liver just by doing this to it?'.