Slashdot Mirror
Artificial Blood Vessels Created On a 3D Printer
rallymatte writes "A team at Fraunhofer Institute in Germany has managed to create artificial blood vessels with a 3D printer that may come to be used for transplants of lab-created organs. From the article: 'To print something as small and complex as a blood vessel, the scientists combined the 3D printing technology with two-photon polymerisation — shining intense laser beams onto the material to stimulate the molecules in a very small focus point.'"
One step closer to creating "Surrogates" ;-)
Let me know when the adult toy industry comes up with a way to print a Real Doll from a series of photographs.
.. and with such headlines, the population gets convinced that we got Star Trek technology standing by.
No wonder why half the population thinks that astronaut training takes places in "antigravity chambers".
(person at the hospital) "What do you mean you don't have this type of blood? Why don't you just print some, I read it on the news."
The three laws of thermodynamics:(1) You can't win. (2) You can't break even. (3) You can't even quit.
because the only thing more expensive than ink toner is human blood. oh wait...
All of a sudden I had this image of printing kidneys, blood vessels and all, shooting out of a laser printer because someone clicked the wrong application.
"I said print out my organizer not organs!"
When my father was in for aortic valve replacement and bypass I asked the surgeon (Dr. Oz, the guy on TV a lot, did his surgery) and his cardiologist why there weren't artificial grafts. Instead they take vessels from the legs, adding another opportunity for infection and something else to heal, not to mention time to the procedure. They said that nobody had any success with it, they didn't know why. Venus grafts clog right back up pretty frequently; arterial grafts do much better, but you don't have a lot of arteries you can spare. TFA talks about capillaries, not coronary arteries. I'm not sure if the tissue needs would be any different.
Joining Blood Vessels Without Sutures + Artificial Blood Vessels Created On a 3D Printer = WIN
Speaking as a person who is already carrying a good $50k worth of implants, my human side rejects this notion while my cyborg side says "bring it".
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Now the ink mongers can suck my blood more efficiently than ever before.
You bring the light from a pulsed laser to a very tight focus inside a photoresist -- the same type of chemical used in standard photolithography. When this photoresist absorbs light with a wavelength of, say, 400nm, it cross-links to become a fairly solid plastic. In normal photolith, you'd illuminate a controlled area with 400nm light.
In two-photon polymerisation, you start with light of, say, 800nm, and you rely on two photons being absorbed at the same time, which together have enough energy to do what a single 400nm photon could. The key here is that, since the probability of this two-photon process depends on the square of the intensity, rather than linearly as in the case of normal one-photon processes, then you can localise it much better: with a tight focus, the chance of polymerising a ~100nm region near the focus is pretty much unity, while the chance of polymerising something away from the focus is pretty much zero. You then move that spot around inside the a blob of photoresist on a microscope slide.
Have a look at Nanoscribe GmbH [nanoscribe.de] for a commercial device, with images of some things they've made.
Seriously, do you have any idea of the amount of serious milling hardware you can get on eBay for 1300$?
You bring the light from a pulsed laser to a very tight focus inside a photoresist -- the same type of chemical used in standard photolithography. When this photoresist absorbs light with a wavelength of, say, 400nm, it cross-links to become a fairly solid plastic. In normal photolith, you'd illuminate a controlled area with 400nm light.
In two-photon polymerisation, you start with light of, say, 800nm, and you rely on two photons being absorbed at the same time, which together have enough energy to do what a single 400nm photon could. The key here is that, since the probability of this two-photon process depends on the square of the intensity, rather than linearly as in the case of normal one-photon processes, then you can localise it much better: with a tight focus, the chance of polymerising a ~100nm region near the focus is pretty much unity, while the chance of polymerising something away from the focus is pretty much zero. You then move that spot around inside the a blob of photoresist on a microscope slide.
Have a look at Nanoscribe GmbH for a commercial device, with images of some things they've made.
I can see teleportation going the 3d printer route.
printing out whatever kinky stuff he needs :)
Oh Giggety, Giggety - GIGGETY!!
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
http://www.npr.org/2011/07/11/137770068/windpipe-grown-from-stem-cells-implanted-in-man
So the fellow in Stockholm, who's name is Paolo Macchiarini, decided to try, first time - he thought the time was ripe to try an experiment in which they would take a scan of his trachea to make sure they had the exact dimensions. A fellow in London has invented this spongy plastic. It's porous. Make a model of his trachea that's exactly the right size. Meanwhile, a company in Massachusetts was making an incubator.
The model and the incubator were flown to Stockholm and the patient was sent there. And they took some of his bone marrow, I think probably from the hip bone. The bone marrow contains stem cells, which can make a variety of different tissues. They combine the fellow's stem cells in this incubator with this model, which sort of serves as a scaffold for the cells to grow on, along with several growth factors that tell the cells what kind of cells to become, namely cartilage, which is what trachea, wind pipes are made of.
And within a couple of days, enough cells have grown in the surface of this thing that they could put it into his - they took out his diseased wind pipe, put this in, stitched him up, and it worked.
You can't take the sky from me...
Now we just need to see how the outcome turns out.
Just don't miss your payments on the replacement organ. Wouldn't want it to be reposessed.