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Inkjet Printer Prints out Human Skin
Anonymous Award writes "Scientists at the University of Manchester in the UK have developed a type of inkjet printer that can print human cells. The scientists claim that it will be possible to print 'made-to-measure' tissue and bones to be grown simply by inputting their
dimensions into a computer. But that's not all, the printer's creator claims that the potential of his team's discovery is enormous: 'You could print the scaffolding to create an organ in a day,' well, one day maybe. Where could this technology lead in a 100 years I wonder? Could it lead to a fax machine for complete living organisms?"
Printing 3D objects is hugh in the design industry. You make a 3D model in maya or whatever, send the file directly to the printer. In an hour or two you got the complete plastic prototype. Hell, you can even have simple mechanical parts readily assembled.
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from the article
experts are able to take skin cells from a patient's body, multiply them, then print out a tailor-made strip of skin, ready to sew on to the body.
I would interpret that the experts are multiplying the cells, then using the printer to arrange them.
Is it possible that the printer would do the culturing for them. I wouldn't imagine it's creating the cells, that seems to sound like nano tech to me
"...Engineering Laboratory at the Medical University of South Carolina, is one of the scientists who has rigged Hewlett-Packard and Canon inkjet printers to shoot out proteins instead of ink, and to capture tissue on specialized gel instead of paper. Older printers work well because their spray nozzles have larger holes and are less likely to damage fragile cells. It would be great to have a use for these old printers instead of searching for a place to recycle them safely..." Link
Culturing them is the easy part. It means they figured out how to squirt live cells through the tiny aperture onto the substrate without rupturing them and killing them.
Sperm and ova would be very poor candidates for stem cells. They only have half of the genome available. Skin inside the cheeks would be better, and so would cells from the lining of the intestins. They naturally divide without limit. Still, marrow seems like the best place to look. (But cheek cells are much easier to get. You know, the part you occasionally bite by accident that isn't the tongue.)
Progress is already being made in converting cells from one variety into another variety...but you need to start with stem cells, and those are difficult to detect.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I'm sorry to hear of what happened to you. Have you heard of this lab-grown skin technology? Here is another article. I believe it is now being used by a company called Stratatech. The patents have the title "Immortalized human keratinocyte cell line". The article says most lab-grown cells last only 15 weeks, while these accidentally discovered cells have lasted for years, since 1996 if I'm not mistaken. I'm not sure, but I think one of it's intended uses is to eliminate the need for donor sites for skin grafts for wounds and burn victims. I haven't read anything else about it other than what is in those articles, so I don't know if it has passed human trials for its intended uses yet, or how well it works, if at all.