Slashdot Mirror
Produce Organs...From Printer
Gavinsblog writes "New Scientist reports that researchers
have modified desktop printers and filled them with suspensions of cells
instead of ink. Apparently the work is a first step towards printing complex
tissues or even entire organs. Amazing technology. " Well, I guess this could give a whole new meaning to "watermarking".
It's funny that at the top of the article it reads "Exclusive from New Scientist Print Edition"
Why is it that all the responses to this story are Funny and there are no Insightful or Interesting responses ?
/. mentality ?
Does this show the
Mail a Macro-exploit to Outlook users that causes anthrax to print out on your printer...
I don't know if this is funny or scary...
ttyl
Farrell
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
Jamming the cells into the proper position works with cartilege - you can sculpt an "ear" out of cartilege and surgically implant it in someone's body, if there ear was cut off.
However, more complex tissues require cell differentiation on a microscopic level.
For example, your inner ear - the part of your ear that you use to hear - cannot be simply sculpted.
Individual cells must diversify so as to play the proper role in the function of the organ; the nerve cells attached to the little hairs all have to be wired up properly and in the correct direction. This is true of all the organs you might wish to make. Actually, I'm not certain about the liver - all hepatocytes (liver cells) are pretty much the same, IIRC.
There are cells in the kidney which exist to move salt out of the blood and into the urine (several different types of cells are involved, actually). They are epithelial cells. However, you cannot assemble a kidney out of epithelial cells; it won't work! The epithelial cells need to know - that is to say, they need to recieve chemical signals which indicate:
a) That this epithelial cell is supposed to play a given role in salt transport (most cells don't make the proteins used in this process.)
b) Which SIDE of the epithelial cell the blood is going to be traveling past and which SIDE of the cell the pre-urine is going to be on. In the living organism the blood may carry this signal (the nature of the signal is probably unknown) but you couldn't duplicate that with a printer.
Stuffing epithelial cells (or even epithelial stem cells) into the overall shape of a kidney does not produce the chemical signals that trigger these differentiation events (when a "generic" epithelial cell - a variety of stem cell - becomes a kidney epithelial cell, it is called "differentiation".) In addition to various ions (Salt,) the kidney has dedicated mechanisms for dealing with dozens of other classes of chemicals.
It is POSSIBLE that such a simulated organ might spontaneously arrange itself into a functioning kidney when blood was pumped through the correct portions.
You might be able to help it along with chemical signals from a real kidney, somehow, or synthetic signals you add yourself.
However, personally, I doubt that either of these strategies is going to work.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
But the concept is really interesting for doing things like creating little insulin producing nodes for diabetics.
Or perhaps little skin-graft packages with a cell mix that would attach to the substrate and then align themselves. Or perhaps producing really effective animal-testing substitutes.
A few years back I spent a little time on a manufacturing think-tank. The one thing everybody agreed was needed was a device that produced objects at their final net shape with no intermediate finishing stages. An inkjet printer basically does that already in two dimensions, and it's additive. It's surely potentially much nearer-term for all sorts of things than (say) exotic silicon micro-machining, and much more process-granular.
I wonder if - no, where - someone is trying to develop an inkjet printer that produces sintered metal shapes?
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
I didn't think most tissue would be 'printable' it's to complex. so don't expect a new set of lungs any time soon.
I'm not sure this argument holds. Any 2400-dpi printer that's actually 2400-dpi can place dots accurately enough to place cells, so placement's not an issue for a specialty printer. You can keep data requirements sane by algorithmically generating the tissue structure map as you print. We already both seem to be assuming that you can store enough types of cell; the limit to the number of inks you can store is a cost/engineering problem, not a strong limit.
In summary, I don't think complexity is a serious roadblock.
The main limits I see are more fundamental. Cells are flexible enough not to deposit easily into well-controlled 3D structures even if you do have a way to form connective tissue on contact (which we don't), and you're going to have an interesting time printing open spaces like blood vessels (water doesn't like staying in one place at *all*). I'm undoubtedly overlooking many other important problems in addition to these.
Still, it's a neat concept.