Slashdot Mirror
A New Biopaper for Organ Printing
Roland Piquepaille writes "Organ printing is an emerging branch of medicine which uses healthy cells to repair a damaged or diseased organ. But as its name implies, this new medical technology needs ink, paper and a printer. Now, a new hydrogel -- or biopaper -- developed at the University of Utah has been selected by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to speed up this process. This five-year NSF study will initially try to print blood vessels and cardiovascular networks. But its real goal is to build some complex organs, such as livers or kidneys. This technology can potentially help millions of people waiting for transplants."
According to my e-mail inbox, i don't need to print a new one, all i need to do is just go to thier website and use a cream or pills or something and i can enlarge my organ to beyond "be1 eef" or something...
Is it sad that I am more likely to recognize you and your posts by your sig than your name or UID?
What I want to know is, how long before a couple of nerds try this obvious application of the technology?
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
And we thought inkjet refills were bad... imagine the price on this stuff.
How long before this will be used for artwork? Designer Tissues. I can't wait for that day.
I want my tux logo printed this way.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
of this over, say, growing organs in either the lab or in animals like pigs? The latter sounds feasible, the former really sounds like something out of a Sci-Fi novel that may come true 50 or 100 years from now, if that. (Reminds me of the nano-tech....)
I could see the practicalities for something like skin but livers and kidneys?
I would like to have a new foreskin, because the one I had was cut off.
Oh good! Now I don't have to stop drinking like a fish, they can just print me a new liver.
The cartridge included with the printer runs out half way through a kidney, and then you find out the replacement cartridge costs $73,489 dollars.
Good: I can finally get a working version of my pancreas.
Bad: when I close my eyes all I can see is "PC LOAD LETTER" blinking.
"Made up/misattributed quote that makes me look smart. I am on
...from Deseret News here
><));>
I wonder if I could get them to print me a new scalp with hair that doesn't fall out? :-)
Prestwich's research into hydrogels has had some other benefits, too... look what a quick Googling turned up:
Prestwich's lab page
More info on the cancer drug delivery mechanism -- not a scientific explanation, more of a press release similar to TFA.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
"Sorry about the dimensions of your new organ. We couldn't get the printer off 'Landscape mode'".
I can think of a few organs that I'd like to print... But is it USB 2.0 compatible?
That's the funniest thing I've heard in a very long time. I will never be able to watch The Empire Strikes Back again and listen to that line without thinking about this joke.
Of course, I'm referring to Bowell Powell.
sorry... sorry...
Looking to save yourself a trip to the Realdoll store, are you?
---GEC
I'm but the humble pupil, seeking to snatch the scratchbuilt pebble from the master's fully articulated hand
If you're going to be printing new 'organs', why not go all the way and use legal-sized paper?
The only question is, should you use black ink to keep it realistic?
Biopaper == Fruit roll-ups for zombies!!
Is it me or is it that for once he gives the direct link?...
He must have got this wrong!
humankind will be working on printing an entire human body and assembling it. Forget sequencing the human genome, printing an entire human and getting it to function would be the greatest achievment of mankind..... Well you never know!
I would just need the last 5.5 inches of it.
Could we use this to print really fine cuts of beef for pennies? Being a geek, I find this particularly interesting because it means I could cook without leaving my computer.
With printed blood vessels on thin sheet and a bit of folding, they could get a nice surface area to volume ratio for an artificial lung. I could also see making gills, but I doubt that a man-size warm-blooded organism can get enough O2 in water.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
And I thought my P.O.S. Epson 777 made a mess when it jammed....imagine the scene when a spleen gets stuck in there.
I assume this same technology could be used to print food. How about a 2 by 4 strip of fresh wood? A living cell replicator is actually going to be developed before a generic molecular replicator? Actually, it makes sense that this would be the case now that I think about it.
Breasts!
Is this the same technology used to print ScuttleMonkey's lips on Roland Piquepaille's tiny man-member?
Will they embed secret codes for personal tracking and identification in these printers too?
Patola (Claudio Sampaio)
Unix System Administrator
This will potentially allow us to live as long as we want. We'd just pop in a new part every time something goes out. The great mystery is the brain transplant.
-Palal
imagine that!
I would be very happy if they just came up with a way to make cheap, high quality filet mignon without raising a whole cow. Cows really take up a lot of space, a lot of feed, and produce a lot of gasses (no, seriously). Plus there's the whole slaughterhouse scene. Good cultured meat would save us money and open up meat-eating (OK, and heart disease) to a lot of poor people around the world. The quality could be even better than natural, with super-fine fat marbling and no big bloody veins. Plus it should be relatively easy to do, since synthetic meat doesn't even have to be a functioning organ... it just has to be close enough to fool my tastebuds. And while we're dreaming, bring on the affordable hormone-free milk...
If you were going to get a skin graft would you be able to have a tattoo printed on it as well.
See my art -> http://herbevore.deviantart.com
I'm gonna print myself a new custom super duper 15" inch penis! Woo Hoo! My Girlfriend is gonna be so excited!!!!!
Powell also disputed Woodward's contention that he and Cheney were so estranged by their differences over the war that they barely speak, insisting that his relationship with the vice president is "excellent."
"When the vice president and I are alone, it's Colin and Dick," he said.
One of the things that cells do extremely well is to figure out where they're supposed to go and what they're supposed to turn into. When injecting stem cells into existing parts of the body, they nicely migrate according to chemical signals and begin transforming into the appropriate type of cell.
The hope is that people will understand the chemical signals well enough so that they can take stem cells from a person's body and induce them to transform into the proper organ type. This doesn't address structure at all, though, which is what the printing process hopes to take care of.
Unfortunately the issue is even more complex. Many cells don't develop properly unless physically manipulated the right way. Muscle cells need to be stretched regularly. Other organs likely face similar issues.
The dream is that nearly every organ in the body can be replaced, something that may be feasible by the time mine are falling apart. Tie this in with stem cell therapies and there's a good chance that the human body can be kept going for quite a long time.
Will the ink refilling industry be as big here as in traditional printers?
1) Webcam scans you at origin.
2) Scan data is beamed to destination.
3) Printer at destination makes a copy of you.
4) Frickin' laser on webcam kills original.
Well, it's a start!
AT&ROFLMAO
This problem could have already been solved with the solution in place saving lives, leave stem cell research alone and let scientists clone organs.
Direct your thank you cards for wasted time and money and lives to Republicans and all their holy roller cronies who all have an average IQ of 53.
The republicans haven't outlawed stem cell research, they've simply said that the gov isn't going to fund embryonic stem cell research. I personally don't think the gov has any busines funding businessess who patent the results and then rape us for their drugs and wish they'd stop handing over money to drug companies or to universities so the drug companies and universities can get more rich.
However keep sending those thankyou cards for all the other bullshit they've been pulling.
G
Starting as a geek with 25 years of software development and project management, I've spent the past year applying that project management experience to looking at the interaction between the heart and the arteries. And I can tell you that arteries are not simple.
First, artery walls are seven (7) layers thick. That's seven distinct types of cells and structures to print.
Second, the old theories viewed arteries merely as passive pipes connecting the heart to the capillaries. But as far back as 1733, Hales understood that the arteries are pumps. He saw them as passive pumps, expanding when blood was pumped into them, and then contracting due to their elastic membranes after each heartbeat. Observations made 50 years ago by McDonald and now being reinterpreted in light of additional data strongly suggests that the arteries are active pumps. (I'll spare you the details, but it adds at least an order of magnitude to the complexity of the 'image'.)
Third, there are at least two sets of nerves that run through the outer wall of the arteries, the sympathetic and parasympathetic. These nerves seem to exert control over the contraction and relaxation of the smooth muscle in the artery wall. We don't yet understand the intricacies of the processes that control the phasing of those contractions and relaxations, but degredation in those control processes seems to be the mechanism behind the development of heart failure. While these nerves will have to be 'printed' and 'wired up' (no USB connections), it's not clear that their connections to the brain are the only contol paths. There may well be other, currently unknown, 'jumpers' that are needed. Closed source software isn't the only thing with undocumented APIs.
So, there are reasons why teflon tubing is not being used as a replacement for arteries. And those reasons will make it hard (but not necessarily impossible) to print arteries. I wish them well. But don't hold your breath. Do take care of your body - it's the only one you have and will continue to be so for quite a while yet.
Morris
I can see some people thinking "what's the minimal portion we need to print off for our purposes?" :O
Freedom: "I won't!"
You can't use it to "print" a hamburger unless you use hamburger "ink." This thing takes cells as its raw material and basically layers them to make the tissue you want - they used the example of stacking donuts of cells, which grow together into a continuous blood vessel.
This only works because the cells are alive and can start functioning together. So you can't use it to make a wooden 2x4 or a beef patty or a sharktooth necklace or whatever. The bits wouldn't stick to each other because they wouldn't grow together if they're dead.
Long ago.
Does life begin when the printer stops, when the job hits the printer buffer, when it's queued, or when the user clicks the Print button? Should canceling a print job be a crime?
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
1/- Identity theft will take on a whole new dimension. 2/- "Second hand" shops will start springing up everywhere.
Go watch "The 6th Day", and then tell me that tissue printers arent going to leave a tracking mark. With RIAA and copyrights, It's probably going to be manditory. Storm
I don't know, but I have a guess based on tangential conversations with biologists: see, the problem is, how do you tell the cells, even if they're willing to divide and grow, to organize themselves into some macroscopic shape, like a sac with tubes and various layers? They don't response to yelled commands, you know. And each cell doesn't exactly have a Master Blueprint in its DNA with its own role marked off in red ink.
As much as I can tell, large organ growth in the living organism is directed by complex gradients of growth factors (chemicals), e.g. a low-to-high concentration of growth factor foo along a finger bud causes the bud to preferentially grow in the direction of the steepest increase in foo concentration -- i.e. along the long axis of the bud -- so the bud grows longer and not wider, all without any mythical "central authority" actually coordinating the activity of the cells.
But if you're trying to grow an organ in a tank, without any surrounding complex bath of growth factors et cetera, it's not likely the environment will be right to direct the growth of the cells, so you're just going to get a pile of unorganized flesh, not a fresh gleaming liver ready to plug in.
What I think they're doing here is figuring a way to direct the growth more or less by "lithography," i.e. by laying down one tiny layer at a time. You lay down a support matrix in the pattern you want the cells to form in this layer, let them grow, add another layer, rinse, repeat....by and by, you can construct any larger organized structure you want, layer by tiny layer. That's the point, I'm guessin.
It's your own cells, so it's compatible. Longetivity should be likewise OK.
A bigger problem might be printer resolution. An eye made with lots of jaggy edges or dithering is not going to be a nice eye, though it would fill the hole in your head.
You can get a new brain, or just some replacement sections.
Proper printing will allow for useful knowledge, including memories. Your new brain will have to be 100% politically correct of course, as determined by the ethics committee.
Is it so wrong to print a chunk of your own leg, then toss it on the grill? Haven't you ever wondered...?
What the subject says.
------------------
"I'm too high to give a fuck. I just want to jerk off and read slashdot, so leave me alone."
Use cells from a cat to print a dog!
You'd need to know how much of the ~25% oxygen in the atmosphere we actually use with each breath and release as unused fuel + waste gas. Then you could figure out the approximate surface area you'd need for gills to supply enough oxygen to the human body. Just a comic-book guess, but that's what'd seem the most logical.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
...there is no typographical character by that name... :(
Hi, any legal out there that can help me out, I want to patent the following templates right away:
8=>, (.) (.) , V please extended patten to include various fonts (wingdings exlcuded) and point sizes. Please note, these templates are not WYSIWYG.
ôó
Yeah, but.. are there Linux drivers for it?
-Myke
The article doesn't say what kind of cells are in the ink. Are they stem cells or what? I think stem cells need some sort of environmental coaching to get them to turn into something specific. But since this tissue is being grown outside the body it seems like they would have to use cells that already know what they are -- liver cells to grow livers, etc. But then I would expect they would have to get the cells from the recipient or risk rejection. Wish there was more info about that.