3D Printing of Human Organ Tissue

 

The reach of 3D printing expands further into medicine.  Already 3D printing has been used to make functioning prosthetics and replacement bones.

The new frontier is printing human (and in the future animal?) organs.  One company plans to begin selling human liver tissue to researchers in a matter of months.  Implanting this tissue into individuals is still a ways off, but the medical research will benefit both humans and animals.  Here is how they do it….

“The [3D printing] process starts when scientists grow human cells from biopsies or stem cells. They then feed the cells into special printers that can arrange them three-dimensionally by cell type in the way that they’d appear in the human body.  Once the cells have been printed in the right arrangement, they begin to signal to one another, fuse and organize themselves into a collective system.”

We are not quite to the point of printing fully functioning livers, kidneys, or hearts, but we can almost see it from here.  The combination of Genetic Engineering and 3D printing is changing the world beneath our feet as we move forward.

Rolan

About Author: rtripp
Founder of Veterinary Future Society

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