Slashdot Mirror
Inside the Weird World of 3D Printed Body Parts
An anonymous reader writes Last November a news report in Russia Today sent a shudder of excitement through the tech blogs that cover 3D printing: an eccentric Russian provocateur claimed he would this month start printing functioning thyroids. Tech reporter Andrew Leonard set out to fact-check that claim, and along the way discovered an unlikely relationship between a Russian mad scientist and the U.S.'s most advanced, most respected 3d bioprinting companies—TeVido, which aims to 3D print custom nipples, and Organovo, which sells samples of 3D printed liver tissue. In the field of 3D printing, the line between science fiction and peer-reviewed research is very, very thin.
"3d printing" is the latest fad for Slashdotters to obsess over; meanwhile, in the real world, people are just going to use more established solutions. For example, where I work we're making great progress towards CNC-milling a pancreas.
You know when it's okay to shout fire in a crowded theatre? When it's on fire.
Within the weird world of weplicated wetware widgets.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Hmmm ... apparently I am unversed in the realm of custom nipples, as I've never conceived of it before. Is this a thing I've been missing?
Why don't you find a breast cancer survivor who has had a mastectomy and ask her about the subject?
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
progress towards CNC-milling a pancreas.
That's interesting. Where I work we're making progress on human transplants of a web-scale ficas using nothing but red staplers crowd funded via a new meta-material crypto currency based on a Bitcoin NoSQL kernel which solves the pressing problem of laser mounted sharks doxing bio-hackers via Twitter's NSA paper trail.
Ohh, so close. You were "SSL exploit" away from Bingo.
Printed parts are still by far inferior to more conventionally produced alternatives. For organs with 3D architecture, by far the most successful approaches have been to basically seed the relevant cell types in layers on a gel or degradable fiber based scaffold. Anthony Atala's group at Wake Forest (no association, just a fan of their work) has made replacement urethras and bladders among many others that have actually been implanted in patients. I believe the bladder work is currently in a phase II clinical trial on its way to becoming more widely available. Sangeeta Bhatia's group has done amazing work on liver tissue, although their focus has been on laboratory samples for drug testing rather than implantation for the time being. They actually do use a 3D printing approach to their work but only to build a sugar-based scaffold that can dissolve away and leave space for blood vessels to be engineered. The tissue itself is just dumped onto the scaffold in a gel slurry and organizes itself.
I think 3D printing tissues is a rather short-sighted approach to assembling structures whose function and shape is self-organized. The most successful approaches thus far (in terms of having products on the market or organs in people) have been strategies that rely on the intrinsic self-organization of tissues. Even more complex structures such as the colonic epithelium can be generated this way.