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Scientists Aim To 'Print' Human Skin
suraj.sun sends this excerpt from CNN:
"Scientists at the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, inspired by standard inkjet printers found in many home offices, are developing a specialized skin 'printing' system that could be used in the future to treat soldiers wounded on the battlefield. 'We started out by taking a typical desktop inkjet cartridge. Instead of ink we use cells, which are placed in the cartridge,' said Dr. Anthony Atala, director of the institute. The device could be used to rebuild damaged or burned skin. ... Burn injuries account for 5% to 20% of combat-related injuries, according to the Armed Forces Institute of Regenerative Medicine. The skin printing project is one of several projects at Wake Forest largely funded by that institute, which is a branch of the US Department of Defense. Wake Forest will receive approximately $50 million from the Defense Department over the next five years to fund projects, including the skin-creating system. Researchers developed the skin 'bio-printer' by modifying a standard store-bought printer. One modification is the addition of a three-dimensional 'elevator' that builds on damaged tissue with fresh layers of healthy skin."
As soon as they get this working (or half working), the sleaze-bags will be promoting the same technology for "enhancements". After the burn treatment, we can give you bigger privates, private!
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
But the cartidges will cost you an arm and a leg (literally!)
Sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of an oncoming train.
This is just the industrial military complex finding better ways to kill brown people.
Oh wait...
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
The device sells for $49.95, but if you want a refill of skin cells, that's $500. And if you buy refills from a third party, they'll charge you with a DMCA violation. It's a perfectly legitimate business model.
We've got a better one already made. It's nothing more than a fancy airbrush and heals burn wounds MUCH faster than this device.
http://www.mirm.pitt.edu/news/article.asp?qEmpID=328
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Beware the foreskin paper jam!
As the grafting process becomes more seamless, I wonder if it might be put to other uses, like tattoo removal. Or even applying tattoos.
How is there that large of a margin? A fifteen percent difference seems rather large. I would think that something like that should be well documented, and leave little room for guestimation.
This reminds me of spray-on skin for burn victims
http://gizmodo.com/#!5749968/spray+on-skin-is-a-reality?comment=36596030
That just blew me away. Instead of weeks of painful recovery and permanent disfigurement, the burn victim is treated in about a week with little or no scarring.
Yes, but would it be cheaper to print a page with a skin cartridge or with an ink cartridge?
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
Will the printer run Linux?
Since it's being designed for military purposes, wouldn't that be PFC Load Letter?
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
I want a printer that prints a person from stem cells that can design a skin cell printer.
Perhaps if you include the HOX proteins in a separate "color" cartridge you could print random critters.
Printable Fleshlights... RAWK!
...of "$LATEST_BIOMEDICAL_ADVANCE that can be used to heal soldiers butchering other human beings".
A cure for any of the thousands neglected diseases all around the world would affect more people than the imperial troop$, but no, we need to print skin for them.
I'm wondering if they plan to release also the photographic "paper" quality, you know, to restore the macho tattoos back to perfection...
Here we go: http://www.eatliver.com/i.php?n=6835
Any possibility of this technology being adaptable for treating people with cancer? Also, it would be damn cool if they could use this technology to print tissue for organs other than skin.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
n/t
Other universities, including Cornell University and the Medical University of South Carolina, Charleston, are working on similar projects...These university researchers say organs -- not just skin -- could be printed using similar techniques.
So, they're working on it
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
the courts said that DMCA can not be used to lock out 3rd party ink.
I suspect that almost any basic research in the "stimulate tissue growth without provoking immune rejection or cancer" genre will eventually have applications to regrowing organs; but there will be additional complications.
Skin(in addition to being an attractive target because it gets damaged a lot and ugly scarring tends to be psychologically problematic) has the advantage of (comparatively) simple geometry. It is a fairly thin membrane with(again comparatively) limited and homogeneous vascular structure. Organs that have a complex 3D structure, and whose function absolutely depends on that structure, will present additional challenges.
On the plus side, if you can solve the cell tractability problem, 3D printing isn't exactly an unknown technology...
I mean, I am no doctor, but does not the Skin Gun covered by National Geographic recently already makes this entire process basically obsolete?
will be interested in this. printing replacement foreskins to restore men's birthright!
Suddenly the market for Nazi lampshades just skyrocketed.
Finally, I can put into mass production my revised & updated Necronomicon 2nd Edition! I hope the printer's drivers support the most diabolical font-face: Comic Sans! (Bwa ha ha!)
With this device there would be no Silence of the Lambs.
I have a couple of friends who have been the victims of some rather nasty burn injuries. They've come out of the experience healthy and dandy well down the road, but each one of them counts the experience as a life-changing event. Any technology that can help severe burn victims should be released to the civilian sector as well.
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
TFA is talking about "5% to 20% of combat-related injuries" - not the number of grafts that are successful.
As for why does it vary that much...
Well, data mentioned is probably taken from a source that lists various ways a soldier could be hurt - compared to various duties and services.
So, pilots might have much greater incidence of falling from a high place and breaking various bones than say.. a cook.
On another hand, drivers probably have a much higher incidence of various car accident related injuries than sailors.
Same goes for burns, or any other form of combat-related injury.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Hate to burst your bubble...but 'printing' cells is not a new concept...from 2007
I could see this also be useful for food.
why grow a whole cow when the ribeye is all you want?
grow the cells in a bioreactor, turn them into a printable paste, print the meat out on a collagen supstrate (also printed) and voilla, steak that is dirt cheap.
with the amount of people eating meat on the rise, this should take a huge cut out of pollution and world hunger. you could even do vegetables and all sorts of other food this way. Sort of like an autokitchen in the known space series
I'd bet that more civilians suffer horrific skin damage than do soldiers. that could be used in the future to treat soldiers wounded on the battlefield. Read as: "Just make sure our funding is bulletproof." In fifty years being an American soldier will entail so little risk this country won't need a valid reason to prosecute a war. We'll just do it.
We need more fiscal restraint and budget cuts, darn it! Enough of this technological progress! Lower taxes!! STOP GOVERNMENT SPENDING!!! /s
Maybe we should stop fighting wars and then we won't need to 'print' skin... Why couldn't they use burn victims as an example?
I was thinking that it'd be great if they could, for example, print lining that could be put inside of a person's stomach actually... I can't imagine that being much more complex than skin... just very resistant to acid.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
On a tangentially related topic, my little sister once had a little internship with the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine. It basically consisted of giving puncture wounds to rats.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
I'm guessing that a paper jam would look like Hannibal Lecters kitchen after a dinner party
why print, all u need is a cookie cutter in the right shape
warning pointless sig
to molecular printing and the Star Trek economy (without the warp drive, tractor beam, and transporter).
I remember seeing a BBC (?) video somewhere about some research lab printing some human organ prototypes. The prototypes weren't functional in themselves but supposedly will be used as scaffolding for embedded heart/lung/etc sells to grow on, thus requiring the success of another technology, stem cell manipulation.
Wake Forest has already demonstrated printing organs from a modified ink jet printer. I'm not sure why the article makes it sound like the idea is exclusive to other universities. Here's a short clip from NOVA on this very topic: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeJPBuBEJ50
Hate to burst all your bubbles Yanks, but here in Australia we've had spray on skin technology for decades. By the way, you're violating our patents. We'll be around shortly to collect. Pay up you bludgers!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spray-on_skin