Tag: human organs

OM in the News: Doctors Reveal They Can 3-D Print Body Parts

3d earUsing a sophisticated, custom-designed 3-D printer, regenerative medicine scientists at Wake Forest Medical Center have proved that it is feasible to print living tissue structures to replace injured or diseased tissue in patients. The scientists said they printed ear, bone and muscle structures, reports Fortune (Feb. 16, 2016). When implanted in animals, the structures matured into functional tissue and developed a system of blood vessels. Most importantly, these early results indicate that the structures have the right size, strength and function for use in humans.

“This novel tissue and organ printer is an important advance in our quest to make replacement tissue for patients,” said the team’s director. “It can fabricate stable, human-scale tissue of any shape. This technology could potentially be used to print living tissue and organ structures for surgical implantation.” The school aims to implant bioprinted muscle, cartilage and bone in patients in the future.

Tissue engineering is a science that aims to grow replacement tissues and organs in the laboratory to help solve the shortage of donated tissue available for transplants. The precision of 3-D printing makes it a promising method for replicating the body’s complex tissues and organs. To demonstrate the printing system can generate organized soft tissue structures, printed muscle tissue was implanted in rats. After 2 weeks, the muscle became vascularized and induced nerve formation. And, to show that construction of a human-sized bone structure, jaw bone fragments were printed using human stem cells. The printed segments of skull bone were implanted in rats. After 5 months, the bioprinted structures had formed vascularized bone tissue.

Classroom discussion questions:

  1. Why is this an important advance?
  2. Where else in OM are 3-D printers being used to help society?

OM in the News: 3-D Printers and Human Organs

Atala's 3-D bioprinter. His 2011 TED talk on bioengineered organs has been viewed more than 2 million times.
Atala’s 3-D bioprinter. His 2011 TED talk on bioengineered organs has been viewed more than 2 million times.

At Wake Forest U.’s Institute for Regenerative Medicine, Dr. Anthony Atala’s research group is pushing the bounds of 3-D printing, with the goal of using that technology to replace human organs that fail, reports Smithsonian (May, 2015). The team works with custom-built bioprinters, powerful machines that operate in much the same way as standard 3-D printers: An object is scanned or designed using modeling software. That data is then sent to the printer, which uses syringes to lay down successive coats of matter until a three-dimensional object emerges. Traditional 3-D printers tend to work in plastics or wax. What’s different in this lab the capability to print something that’s alive.

The machine in the photo has a  frame of heavy metal, with  transparent walls. Inside are 6 syringes arranged in a row. One holds a biocompatible plastic that, when printed, forms the interlocking structure of a scaffold—the skeleton, essentially—of a printed human organ or body part. The others can be filled with a gel containing human cells or proteins to promote their growth. The external structure of the ear is one of the first structures that Wake Forest has tried to master, as a stepping stone toward more complicated ones. Staffers have implanted bioprinted skin, ears, bone, and muscle on laboratory animals, where they grew successfully into the surrounding tissue.
The number of 3-D printers in medical facilities is expected to double in the next 5 years. The trials are a harbinger of a world where patients order up replacement parts for their body the same way they used to order a replacement carburetor for their car. Atala claims we are getting close, with “simple” organs like skin, the external ear, the tube-like trachea. At the same time, he likes to envision a vast bioprinting industry capable of cranking out big and complex organs without which the body would fail, like the liver or the kidney. Such an industry could make traditional transplants completely obsolete.
Classroom discussion questions:
1. Why is 3-D printing so important to the future of medicine?
2. How is 3-D printing being used today in advancing manufacturing?