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Why Your New Heart Could Be Made in Space One Day (bbc.com)
Imagine a laboratory growing human hearts - and imagine that laboratory floating in space hundreds of miles above the surface of the Earth. That may sound like science fiction, but bizarre as it seems, it could bring new hope for transplant patients within the next decade. From a report: While about 7,600 heart transplants were carried out around the world in 2017, there's a desperate shortage of organs, with thousands of people on waiting lists dying every year. Efforts to grow human hearts in the lab are showing promise, but are hampered by the need for the organs to grow around a "scaffolding" to make sure they don't collapse during the process. Reliably removing the scaffolding once the heart is complete is proving to be a challenge.
Space tech company Techshot believes zero gravity could be the answer. The International Space Station (ISS) is in constant freefall around the planet, meaning that anything inside experiences effective weightlessness, known technically as microgravity. This means organs could be grown without the need for any scaffolding, believes Rich Boling, the firm's vice-president of corporate advancement. One day hearts could be grown commercially for transplant, Techshot believes. [...] Developed in partnership with Nasa, Techshot's BioFabrication Facility (BFF) is a microwave oven-sized device that uses 3D printing techniques to create patches for heart repairs using a patient's own stem cells.
Space tech company Techshot believes zero gravity could be the answer. The International Space Station (ISS) is in constant freefall around the planet, meaning that anything inside experiences effective weightlessness, known technically as microgravity. This means organs could be grown without the need for any scaffolding, believes Rich Boling, the firm's vice-president of corporate advancement. One day hearts could be grown commercially for transplant, Techshot believes. [...] Developed in partnership with Nasa, Techshot's BioFabrication Facility (BFF) is a microwave oven-sized device that uses 3D printing techniques to create patches for heart repairs using a patient's own stem cells.
Living organisms grown in space have shown a wide range of unwanted behaviour, lack of gravity provides zero clues to the organ or organism as to what direction is up or down and you would just end up with 7 heartpits all disconnected in a spiral arrangement that arises from circling the planet
So an organ that evolved to grow and work in a 1G environment will be grown in a 0G environment? Methinks there might be some consequences to that. If they can pull it off that would be amazing but that sounds like quite a challenge. It's not immediately clear to me how 0G removes the need for scaffolding entirely. Would it not just change the type of scaffolding needed rather than removing the need entirely? Could be an improvement of course - I'm not bashing the idea - just trying to think it through. Fluids and other chemicals behave differently in the absence of gravity and I'd be shocked if that wasn't a big technical hurdle.
Assuming the technology is workable though the real problem will be funding the research. Researching this will require spending some pretty serious time in orbit and despite the best efforts of SpaceX and others that remains pretty darn expensive and will remain so for some time to come.
You can pry my old heart from my cold dead hands!
Oh wait.
How much will it cost to launch the needed starter cell culture into space, presumably have someone up their manning it (even if mostly automated), return it from space...etc.
SpaceX plans to eventually get costs down to $1700 per kg with the Falcon Heavy. I could almost see the first privately (or semi-privately)owned space station being one where companies can rent research/production space and the station operator has techs up there to run the experiments/production facilities, maintain the station, etc. While it could be expensive, it probably wouldn't be prohibitively so. Especially considering you would be making (hopefully) rejection-proof, lifesaving replacement organs.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
How much will it cost to launch the needed starter cell culture into space, presumably have someone up their manning it (even if mostly automated), return it from space...etc.
Forget that. Think about how much the research costs would be. This isn't something you can test on the ground - you have to actually do your research in zero-G. And something like this will take a loooooong time to figure out so it's going to be ludicrously expensive to do the R&D. Production would probably be a modest sum by comparison presuming they can automate it to a useful degree.
One more incredible medical service that will be available to those who can afford it. Gotta take care of rich folks! Who would give the rest of us jobs?
Dragon can currently return about two tonnes of payload from orbit in a single flight. Could easily be hundreds of hearts in a flight. Still expensive, but compared to US healthcare, not as much. Also, if it's custom-grown, then you might be actually saving money on the post-transplant healthcare, compared to a donor organ. I guess the real question whether we won't ultimately accomplish this on Earth more easily. Chances are that we will.
Ezekiel 23:20
Wait, what?
Someone to yell Kalima, rip my still beating heart out, and toss it into molten lava, what else?
<Sarcasm>Yea, there is a chance that such an experiment may not work. So why bother trying at all. Sure the benefit can mean a way to save lives. But there are variables which are untested and we don't know 100% what the results are. So lets not try. </Sarcasm>
For a site, that is suppose to cover science and technology news, there is a heck of a lot of posts of people just coming up with reasons out of the blue, on why it will fail miserably. While Scientific reporting is general really bad, but there are a lot of things that are worth a shot to try. Especially, if a success could be beneficial.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Sure back in the olden days. Water Closets were a luxury for the rich. Running water, a place to take your output somewhere where you don't need to think about it. This was something only the Rich had. It took generations of infrastructure and improvement in processes for the average person to have running water in their houses, and their own WC.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Being an AC you probably won't see this, but: If you legally allow sale of human organs, you open the door to criminals taking advantage of this to sell illegally obtained human organs more openly. Author Larry Niven referred to these as 'Organleggers' and it was a big problem in his fictitious future Earth. Imagine people being snatched off the street and literally broken up for their bodyparts. Big business, big profit. Nope! Can't allow that to happen, and if you allow legal sale of human organs and other bodyparts then that's what will happen.
Most of our organs were grown in a neutral buoyant environment, which has a lot of the same effects of being in 0g.
Some but not all. There are two very important differences. Objects in neutral buoyancy still experience the effects of gravity on their mass. This affects fluids and tissues significantly. The second is that friction and drag is still in play in neutral buoyancy due to the fluid medium. We already know that microgravity has a measurable effect on muscle growth and structure and the heart is a muscle.
The idea of growing organs in microgravity is an interesting one but there are a lot of potential reasons why it might not work. It seems unlikely that microgravity would provide all benefits with no problems.
The article came from someone whose job title is "vice-president of corporate advancement", in other words, a marketing drone.