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We're Getting Closer To Mass Production of Bones, Organs, and Implants (bloomberg.com)

Medical researchers have been able to create certain kinds of living cells with 3D printers for more than a decade. Now a few companies are getting closer to mass production of higher-order tissues (bone, cartilage, organs) and other individually tailored items, including implants. From an article: Organovo has successfully transplanted human liver tissue into mice to cure chronic liver failure. Pending the success of human trials, possible applications include the $3 billion market for inherited conditions such as hemophilia. [...] Aspect prints tissue cells to create structures that resemble parts of the human body, such as an airway or meniscus, to spur easier research on treatments for, say, asthma or muscle tears. By taking muscle cells from a lung, for example, the company built respiratory tissue that responded to common asthma inhalers as a person's body should. [...] Materialise designs custom 3D-printable implants, surgical guides, and other medical devices. It's waiting on approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for implants designed to fuse bones.

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  1. Re:Does this include genitalia? by interkin3tic · · Score: 5, Informative

    No it's not yet because those things are more technically challenging. In genitals, you have dense arrays of nerves, pretty complex blood vessels, a bunch of "filler" tissue, the urethra, and skin. What is technically possible now is growing one type of cell or tissue, that's routine, with research starting to get into multiple types of cells grown together. Two different types of cells together gets much more complicated, and growing them together in a specific structure, rather than a random blend, at scales big enough to see without a microscope... that's beyond capabilities at the moment.

    On top of that, the focus remains on the simpler tissues for economic reasons. If you can grow a liver in a dish (Organovo's main focus) you can make billions testing drugs for safety. One of the most common reasons expensive drug candidates fail is they kill your liver, another common reason is that drug candidates get processed in the liver to become something toxic to somewhere else. Doing this testing in animals is hideously expensive, slow, and often not very good at actually predicting how it will do in humans. Testing in human cells in a dish would be much easier. Drug testing is extremely expensive but also necessary. So it's a huge market. Genital replacement on the other hand is pretty low-demand compared to that. So there's huge economic advantages to focusing on the simpler goal, much less in creating much more complex genitals.

    Genital repair should eventually be a goal though if we actually care at all about our soldiers or those other unfortunate individuals you mentioned. It's worth serious consideration, this is no joke, and feel free to smack down anyone in the future who brings it up lightly by pointing out it's an important goal even though "LOL WEINERS." And people are definitely working on it. Just it's not going to happen before we get livers in a dish.