Literally…Print Your Heart Out

Greetings,

      Print Your Heart Out

Organovo’s 3D-printed liver tissue contains three different types of cells. The dominant cells, stained blue, are roughly 20 μm in diameter. Credit: Organovo

Editor’s note: To help us celebrate our Building Blocks of Everything theme, our friends at Chemical & Engineering News offered to share some of their reports throughout the week.

​ It was an honest question. But the way Stuart K. Williams asked it sounded like the prelude to a wager: Which organ will researchers first replicate with three-dimensional bioprinting?

Williams, the director of the Bioficial Organs Program at the University of Louisville, posed the question to Gabor Forgacs of the University of Missouri at last month’s Select Biosciences Tissue Engineering & Bioprinting Conference in Boston. Forgacs, having just delivered the keynote speech, mulled the question over.

Some believe 3D printers will one day create viable organ transplants using a patient’s own cells. This would alleviate complications that arise when a patient’s immune system rejects a donor organ. And it would put an end to growing transplant wait lists. For every organ donor in 2012, there were more than eight patients on the transplant wait list, according to the US. Department of Health & Human Services.

Williams’s question hung in the air for a moment. The conference hall overlooking the Charles River was packed even though the latest in a series of record-setting snowstorms kept many would-be attendees away. The crowd waited silently for Forgacs’s answer, but everyone there had an inkling of what it would be.

Forgacs, a pioneer in bioengineering who’s printed 3D structures with “inks” made of living cells, hedged the question, reminding the audience of comments he made during his talk. “Everybody’s dream is the 3D-printed organ. Are we ever going to get there?” he asked himself. “I’m not so sure.”

Bioprinting’s more immediate impact will be in making small patches of tissue for screening drugs or for better understanding biology, Forgacs said. Before researchers can even hope to tackle the far more complex problem of printing an entire organ, he added, they will need to confront some daunting challenges, such as figuring out how to print blood vessels capable of supplying artificial organs with essential nutrients…..More Here

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