Tag: printing organs

OM in the News: The Next Israeli Breakthrough May Be a 3-D Printed Heart

This photo at the University of Tel Aviv shows a 3D print of heart with human tissue.

“The future is here,” one shopper remarked to another at a Tel Aviv market after watching the TV report that Israeli scientists unveiled a 3D print of a heart with human tissue and vessel. Calling it a first and a “major medical breakthrough” that advances possibilities for transplants, scientists hope one day to be able to produce hearts suitable for transplant into humans as well as patches to regenerate defective hearts.

The heart produced by researchers at Tel Aviv University is about the size of a rabbit’s. It marked the first time anyone anywhere has successfully engineered and printed an entire heart replete with cells, blood vessels, ventricles and chambers, reports The Times of Israel (April 19, 2019). The researchers plan to transplant them into animal models in about a year. “Maybe, in 10 years, there will be organ printers in the finest hospitals around the world, and these procedures will be conducted routinely,” said the project leader.

Their work involved taking a biopsy of fatty tissue from patients that was used in the development of the “ink” for the 3D print. Using the patient’s own tissue was important to eliminate the risk of an implant provoking an immune response and being rejected. Challenges that remain include how to expand the cells to have enough tissue to recreate a human-sized heart.

Current 3D printers are also limited by the size of their resolution and another challenge will be figuring out how to print all small blood vessels. But while the current 3D print was a primitive one, larger human hearts require the same technology. 3D printing has opened up possibilities in numerous fields, provoking both promise and controversy.

Classroom discussion questions:

  1. Name five other major breakthroughs in technology out of Israel.
  2. Have other body parts been “printed”?

OM in the News: 3-D Printing Moves to Human Organs

“Need an artery for bypass surgery or custom cartilage for that worn-out knee?”, asks The Wall Street Journal (Sept.18, 2012). Then just hit “print” on your 3-D printer.

In laboratories across the U.S., biomedical engineers are working on ways to print living human tissue, with the goal of producing personalized body parts and implants on demand. These tissue-engineering experiments represent the next step in a process known as computerized adaptive manufacturing, in which industrial designers turn out custom prototypes and finished parts using inexpensive 3-D computer printers.

Instead of extruding plastic, metal or ceramics, these medical printers squirt an ink of living cells– called shorthand bioprinting. The machines can build up tissue structures, layer by layer, into all sorts of 3-D shapes, such as tubes suitable for blood vessels, contoured cartilage for joints, or patches of skin and muscle for living Band-Aids.

At Cornell, researchers are printing heart valves, knee cartilage and bone implants. At Wake Forest, bioengineers are printing kidney cells and are working on a portable unit to print healing tissue directly into burns or wounds. At the University of Missouri, researchers have printed viable blood vessels and sheets of beating heart muscle. Biomedical engineers hope to print out tailored tissues suitable for surgery and entire organs that could be used in transplants, to eliminate long delays for patients awaiting suitable donor organs and the risk their bodies may reject the tissue.

Leading the way is Organovo Inc., which introduced the first commercial 3-D bioprinters in 2010, and has so far made 10 of its “NovoGen” bioprinters. “It allows us to print a tissue structure that is a functional, living, human tissue,” says Organovo’s CEO.

Discussion questions:

1. Relate these 3-D printers to those currently being used in industry (see Chapter 5).

2. How is this advancement an OM issue?