Imagine printing a human liver. Or a kidney. One day this will be possible, and with a desperate global shortage of organs for transplant, the medical industry is pouring resources into developing technologies that will make this a reality.
“Eighteen people die every day in the US waiting for a transplant,” says Michael Renard, executive vice president for commercial operations at San Diego-based Organovo, one of the companies that is leading the way in tissue engineering.
Like other forms of 3D printing, living tissue is printed layer by layer. First a layer of cells is laid down by the printer, followed by a layer of hydrogel that operates as a scaffold material; then the process repeats. The cells fuse, and the hydrogel is removed to create a piece of material made entirely of human cells. This is then moved to a bioreactor, where the tissue continues to grow – as it would in nature – into its final form.
This project is featured in Print Shift, a print-on-demand magazine by Dezeen(read more at Dezeen.com) with publishers Blurb about how 3D printing is changing everything in architecture, design, fashion, food, medicine and more.