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".

Comments

Insightful message...

[heytal]

Why is it that all the responses to this story are Funny and there are no Insightful or Interesting responses ?

Does this show the /. mentality ?

Differentiation

[sam_handelman]

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.

Lots of cell types = organ

[panurge]

Of course even apparently simple organs need lots of cell types - the liver needs blood vessels as well as the various types of liver cells, and even skin consists of multiple layers with different properties.And making anything which needs structural properties could be a problem - cells that need to intertwine, like muscle and bone. Not really a case for even a hexachrome cartridge.

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?