Real Science

[STSF_Scooter 0]

SCIENCE & ENVIRONMENT

 

21 February 2011 Last updated at 05:31 ET

'Printing out' new ears and skin

By Jason Palmer and Matt Danzico

BBC News, Washington DC

 

The next step in the 3D printing revolution may be body parts including cartilage, bone and even skin.

Three-dimensional printing is a technique for making solid objects with devices not unlike a computer printer, building up line by line, and then vertically layer by layer.

While the approach works with polymers and plastics, the raw ingredients of 3D printing have been recently branching out significantly.

The printers have been co-opted even to make foods, and do-it-yourself biology experiments dubbed "garage biotech" - and has most recently been employed to repair a casting of Rodin's sculpture The Thinker that was damaged in a botched robbery.

But at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington DC, the buzzword is bioprinting: using the same technique to artfully knock out new body parts.

Print preview

James Yoo, of the Institute of Regenerative Medicine at Wake Forest University, told the meeting of his group's aim to print skin directly onto burn victims.

"What motivated us to start this programme and development is the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq," he said.

"Up to 30% of all injuries and casualties that occur from the war involve the skin, and using bioprinting we thought that we could address some of the challenges they're facing with burn care."

Professor Yoo's group is developing a portable system that can be brought directly to burn victims.

"What's unique about this device is that it has a scanner system that can identify the extent and depth of the wound, because every wound is different," he said.

He added: "That scan gets converted into 3D digital images; that determines how many layers of cells then need to be deposited to restore the normal configuartion of the injured tisue."

Hod Lipson, director of the Computational Synthesis Laboratory at Cornell University, brought a 3D printer to the conference, to demonstrate how his well-established project, named Lab@Home, is branching out into bioprinting - by creating an ear.

Ear today

The machine starts with a computer file with the 3D coordinates from a scan of a real ear.

For the demonstration, the real cells that the group would normally use have been replaced with silicone gel in order to bioprint the shape.

The team has also published its results from bioprinting repairs in damaged animal bone.

But the method is still in its infancy, and several technical hurdles lie between the groups' current efforts and a future in which injured body parts are repaired digitally on-site or simply printed out fresh.

"Some tissues can be handled more easily than others," Professor Lipson said.

"We and our colleagues have started with cartilage; it's amorphous, it doesn't have a lot of internal structure and vascularisation - that's the entry level point to start with.

"That has been fairly successful in animal models, and that would be the first thing you'll see used in practice. From there we'll climb the complexity of tissue, going to bone, or perhaps liver."

Another concern is that bioprinted tissues aren't easy to connect to the real thing.

"One of the advantages of using the computerised printing is that you can create a tissue construct in a more accurate manner than when you're trying to build something manually," Professor Yoo said.

"But how can we create and connect those tissues produced outside the body?Whatever you put in the body has to be connected with the body's blood vessels, blood supply and oxygen. That's one of the challenges we'll face with larger tissues."

Whatever the challenges ahead, Professor Lipson told BBC News that he believed bioprinting will overcome them to become a standard technique.

"If I have to guess, I'd say that in 20 years this technology will be mainstream, absolutely," he said.

 

BBC © MMXI The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Read more.

[Cmdr JFarrington 0]

Interesting stuff, Scooter, made even more interesting by Manticore's regeneration machine - which now seems more possible than ever.

 

There is a story on Organ Regeneration in the March 2011 issue of National Geographic magazine. The full story can be found on their online site - National Geographic.org - do a search on "Organ Regeneration." As the article mentions, the impetus for this research was returning soldiers and their need for replacements.

 

Here's an ear they have produced. A small start, but a start nonetheless.

 

 

Above: The synthetic scaffold of an ear sits bathed in cartilage-producing cells, part of an effort to grow new ears for wounded soldiers.

[Crash Calestorm 0]

Medical advancements aside, and this is wonderful if this technology becomes maintsteam within the next few years, what about degradation concerns?

 

Considerings these grown organs/parts aren't the original model so to speak, I'm wondering if the pieces might degrade faster then say the average human body?

[Chirakis 1]

Medical advancements aside, and this is wonderful if this technology becomes maintsteam within the next few years, what about degradation concerns?

 

Considerings these grown organs/parts aren't the original model so to speak, I'm wondering if the pieces might degrade faster then say the average human body?

 

I would think that the same degradation concerns would hold for anything artificial put into the natural body - a tooth filling, for instance, or silicone implants. According to the article, the scientists are concerned about degradation and the science is very young.

 

More than 100,000 people are waiting for organ transplants in the U.S. alone; every day 18 of them die. Not only are healthy organs in short supply, but donor and patient also have to be closely matched, or the patient's immune system may reject the transplant. A new kind of solution is incubating in medical labs: "bioartificial" organs grown from the patient's own cells. Thirty people have received lab-grown bladders already, and other engineered organs are in the pipeline.

 

The bladder technique was developed by Anthony Atala of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Researchers take healthy cells from a patient's diseased bladder, cause them to multiply profusely in petri dishes, then apply them to a balloon-shaped scaffold made partly of collagen, the protein found in cartilage. Muscle cells go on the outside, urothelial cells (which line the urinary tract) on the inside. "It's like baking a layer cake," says Atala. "You're layering the cells one layer at a time, spreading these toppings." The bladder-to-be is then incubated at body temperature until the cells form functioning tissue. The whole process takes six to eight weeks.

 

Solid organs with lots of blood vessels, such as kidneys or livers, are harder to grow than hollow ones like bladders. But Atala's group—which is working on 22 organs and tissues, including ears—recently made a functioning piece of human liver. One tool they use is similar to an ink-jet printer; it "prints" different types of cells and the organ scaffold one layer at a time.

 

Other labs are also racing to make bioartificial organs. A jawbone has sprouted at Columbia University and a lung at Yale. At the University of Minnesota, Doris Taylor has fabricated a beating rat heart, growing cells from one rat on a scaffold she made from the heart of another by washing off its own cells. And at the University of Michigan, H. David Humes has created an artificial kidney from cells seeded onto a synthetic scaffold. The cell-phone-size kidney has passed tests on sheep—it's not yet implantable, but it's wearable, unlike a dialysis machine, and it does more than filter toxins from blood. It also makes hormones and performs other kidney functions.

 

Growing a copy of a patient's organ may not always be possible—for instance, when the original is too damaged by cancer. One solution for such patients might be a stem cell bank. Atala's team has shown that stem cells can be collected without harming human embryos (and thus without political controversy) from amniotic fluid in the womb. The researchers have coaxed those cells into becoming heart, liver, and other organ cells. A bank of 100,000 stem cell samples, Atala says, would have enough genetic variety to match nearly any patient. Surgeons would order organs grown as needed instead of waiting for cadavers that might not be a perfect match. "There are few things as devastating for a surgeon as knowing you have to replace the tissue and you're doing something that's not ideal," says Atala, a urologic surgeon himself. "Wouldn't it be great if they had their own organ?" Great for the patient especially, he means.

 

~NationalGeographic.com

[V'Roy 0]

But what happens if the printer jams or you run out of ink or something?