Toner News Mobile › Forums › Latest Industry News › *NEWS*WEIRD SCIENCE:PRINTING A NEW BODY
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AnonymousInactiveWeird Science: Printing a New Body
TORONTO,You’ve been shooting back whiskey your whole life
and your liver is screaming for mercy. Knowing how uncomfortable a liver
transplant could be, you opt for a safer route: Drop some cells off at the
doctor’s office and wait for a machine to manufacture a new liver designed for
your body.Welcome to the future of tissue engineering, where that new
organ could be designed with the unlikeliest of tools: An inkjet
printer.“This could have the same kind of impact that Gutenberg’s press
did,” says Vladimir Mironov, director of the Shared Tissue Engineering
Laboratory at the Medical University of South Carolina. Spearheaded by Mironov,
a team of scientists has configured inkjet printers to shoot out proteins
instead of ink, using thermoreversible gel instead of paper to capture the 3D
tissue.Thomas Boland, an assistant bioengineering professor at Clemson
University, modified the printer and he says “printing a nose isn’t so far off.
Cartilage uses only one cell type.” Mironov adds that a printed nose could take
only five minutes to create.While the scientists — the first to print
living tissue — have already built hamster ovaries, printing complex organs like
livers is years away. But not impossible, thanks to this intriguing
breakthrough.“We always need a harmonious vascular tree,” remarks
Mironov, alluding to a biology-class term of tissue tubes common throughout the
body. By printing these tubes in an area as large and sensitive as
a human
organ, scientists can pass the first step in organ regeneration.As eerie
as this Face/Off scenario sounds, Mironov underlines the positive
impacts: Organ transplants can be replaced by tissue-engineering technology;
testing drugs on printed organs can sidestep the ethical issue of using humans
as guinea pigs; and tissue engineering can be the new plastic surgery, allowing
someone to print Madonna’s nose — if she’s willing to donate her
cells.With the benefits outlined, Mironov excitedly dives into an
explanation on the printing process, dropping words like “aggregates” and
“prototyping.” Essentially, ink cartridges are filled with clumps of living
cells and what’s called smart gel. The printer nozzle prints the cells and gel,
which serves as the paper, and then the cells fuse to form tubes — 3D structures
unseen in any petri dish procedure. The smart gel is later cooled, then washed
away to leave only cells behind. Special software quarterbacks the
process.“When I first saw how exact the cells lined up in 3D space,”
Mironov says, “I said, ‘Wow! Now that’s a solution.’” Mironov adds a chilling
concept: “Once we learn how to produce isolated body parts, we could eventually
be able to build a whole body.”The science community recognizes the
tissue-engineering work as an innovative path to futuristic health care. Mironov
was a finalist for a World Technology Award, in the health and medicine
category, and Mironov and Boland were invited to an Orlando symposium to speak
on organ printing.Optimistic that his work will shake up fields like
stem-cell research and nanotechnology, Mironov believes cell printers will be as
commonplace as microscopes. “This is a friendly technology that poses no ethical
problems,” he says. “The only question is not when progress will be made, but
where the money is going to come from.” Like all scientific innovations, funding
is the force that keeps the research and development flowing; unfortunately for
Mironov et al., grants and private donors aren’t stepping forward.One
saving grace is the inexpensive printers implemented in this delicate process.
Instead of using the newest models, the tissue-engineering team has chosen
Hewlett-Packard’s 600 series, a 10-year-old model. The reason? Bigger print
nozzles.Science is not as complex as you thought it was. And that fresh,
alcohol-free liver is not as unlikely as you thought it would
be. -
AuthorMarch 17, 2005 at 10:59 AM
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