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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.
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.
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
I wonder if I could get them to print me a new scalp with hair that doesn't fall out? :-)
They do mention in the article that complex organs such as a liver or a kidney are a long way off. It does sound like science fiction, but if they can at least start with what they claim :
"I believe in five years we're going to be able to print simple organs, such as a cardiovascular network or a urethra,"
I think that it is a good step to actually growing organs for people. Just because something is science fiction today doesn't mean it will be in the future.
Of course, the longetivity and compatibility of the organs is always the largest hurdle when dealing with transplants in general. Just like in transplants, these two issues will be paramount in new endeavors. My question is, how long do these organs really last? That is the largest question on whether this will stay science fiction or if it will become routine procedure in 10 years. If the complex procedure only lasts 5 years, it may be more worthwhile to get an actual transplant.
"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?
sorry... sorry...
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!!
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!
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.
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
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...
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
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.
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.
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.