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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."
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.
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.
As the grafting process becomes more seamless, I wonder if it might be put to other uses, like tattoo removal. Or even applying tattoos.
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.
Viagra was initially researched by Pfizer as a treatment for angina, and just happened to fix erectile dysfunction *really well*. That doesn't make Pfizer sleazy, just like plastic surgeons aren't sleazy for giving a chick bigger tits if she wants them. Don't lie to yourself, you're judged on your physical appearance (or, in this case, "proportions"). Who cares if guys buying bigger dicks fund the R&D for regenerative medicine? Money is money.
Biology is inconsistent. The patients with 5% improvement are probably the ones whose bodies don't heal well after burns and don't accept the graft very well. The 20% do heal burns well and readily accepted the graft.
You know, the Red Cross was initially founded to help wounded troops. Now, they do disaster relief, humanitarian missions, etc. They keep thousands from dying all across the world every year. Many medical advances that we take for granted today came about through the treatment of wounded soldiers. Just because this technology is being used for soldiers does not mean it will never be developed for civilian use as well.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
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'
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?
If you bothered to use your brain for a 2#$!% minute, you would realize a few things:
1) Soldiers are not out there because they wanted to, they decided to serve their country so you could stay home and play your video games. If they did not sign up in enough numbers, they would force you to serve as soon as they run out of volunteers. Remember every time that a soldier gets killed or looses his legs because of a bomb, that it could had been you out there had he and many others not volunteered.
2) It is good to know military budget goes into medical research that can also be used to save civilians in, say, burning buildings and not entirely to develop new guns and bombs.
Sorry, but it only prints white skin. The color ink cartridges are WAY too expensive.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
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
If you bothered to use your brain for a 2#$!% minute, you would realize a few things:
1) Soldiers are not out there because they wanted to, they decided to serve their country so you could stay home and play your video games. If they did not sign up in enough numbers, they would force you to serve as soon as they run out of volunteers. Remember every time that a soldier gets killed or looses his legs because of a bomb, that it could had been you out there had he and many others not volunteered.
Or cause it is the only job they can get as there are not that many opportunities around. Or to pay for college. Or cause they are members of the Green Card Brigade.
As for "your ass there instead" - there is always Canada. That is, unless your dad can arrange for you to "serve" behind a desk somewhere.
Or to dick around in a military jet.
2) It is good to know military budget goes into medical research that can also be used to save civilians in, say, burning buildings and not entirely to develop new guns and bombs.
$9.7 billion budget divided over 5 million beneficiaries, 27,000 soldiers and 28,000 civilian employees, another 20,000 active-duty medical soldiers in field units, plus over 30,000 medical soldiers in the National Guard and Army Reserve.
That is only 1.29% of the $721.3 billion DOD budget, which is again only between 49.7 and 68% of the annual US Military budget.
So it's actually more like 0.64 - 0.87% of the total military budget, for 2011 alone.
Just to illustrate how ridiculously little that is...
A person making ~$50k a year, who would donate $50 each month to medical R&D - would do more for medical research funding, per dollar earned, then the entire military and defense budget of the United States of America.
That is less than $2 a day.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
How about restoring said parts to the way they SHOULD be? Circumcision reversal, here we go!
Circumcision is child abuse.
Oh definitely, until of course, y'know... The immune system starts attacking the foreign cells. That might be a small bump on the road.
Feel free to mod me down, just know that unlike some Anonymous Cowards I'm not afraid to express my views as myself.
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.
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
Isn't BLACK the default color in printers?
The article said,
"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"
So, I pulled up an old Newspaper article from 15250 BC (amazing what Google has scanned in to date!), and it had this:
"Grog and Togoth at the second cave after the boulder, inspired by standard sprayed blood found in caves, are developing a specialized skin 'printing' system."
They also had a solution for Male Erectile Deficiency, but it involved chisels and sheep skin and I don't think it actually worked.