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Artificial Blood Vessels Created On a 3D Printer

Posted by samzenpus on from the time-to-change-the-vascular-cartridge dept.

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.'"

1 of 33 comments (clear)

  1. Re:What a headline by Arancaytar · · Score: 4, Informative

    (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."

    Blood vessel != blood cell. Or is that the joke?

    The headline doesn't exaggerate. They need to make artificial capillaries for synthetic tissue, and now they've come up with a way to make them. It'll be years before this will have progressed far enough to be an actual product (let alone one that is routinely used on human patients), but that's how all research works.