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Printing Replacement Body Parts
Deep Penguin sends in a piece that appeared in The Economist a couple of weeks back about a developing technology to "print" body parts for transplant. "A US and an Australian company have developed the $200,000 machine, which works by depositing stem cells and a 'sugar-based hydrogel' scaffolding material. (The stem cells are harvested from a transplant patient's own fat and bone marrow, to avoid rejection down the line.) The companies are Organovo, from San Diego, specializing in regenerative medicine, and Invetech, an engineering and automation firm in Melbourne, Australia. The initial targets are skin, muscle, and 'short stretches of blood vessels,' which they hope to have available for human implantation within five years. Down the line, they expect the technology could even print directly into the body, bypassing the in-vitro portion of the current process."
This mouse called dibs 8 years ago.
Seriously though, this certainly isn't the first time this has been done. Previous methods also used similar 3D printing techniques, except that the printed organ was a "dud" that was impregnated (injected and suspended in fluids, as I remember) with cells, instead of the organ being printed in one pass.
Not that this isn't very interesting, it's just not as new as they make it seem.
Entomologically speaking, the spider is not a bug, it's a feature.
It wouldn't work. As near as I can tell from the literature pointed out by my Type 1 co-worker, the immune problemm that destroyed your insulin producing cells is probably still active, and would also destroy the self-grown transplant tissue. My co-worker also pointed out some fascinating immuno-suppressive therapies that seem to control this problem, and allow diabetic animals to regenerate their own insulin producing cells, which seems like having this printer without bothering to buy the printer.
It's described at http://www.faustmanlab.org/, and it's quite fascinating work.