Originally published January 8 2006
Researchers believe organs will soon be printable
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
A collaborative study between three universities, led by University of Missouri-Columbia biological physics professor Gabor Forgacs, claims that it will soon be possible to print organs out using bio-ink and bio-paper, and so far the study has produced tubes similar to blood vessels and sheets of heart muscle cells.
Led by University of Missouri-Columbia biological physics professor Gabor Forgacs and aided by a $5 million National Science Foundation grant, researchers at three universities have developed bio-ink and bio-paper that could make so-called organ printing a reality.
So far, they've made tubes similar to human blood vessels and sheets of heart muscle cells, printed in three dimensions on a special printer.
"I think this is going to be a biggie," said Glenn D. Prestwich, the University of Utah professor who developed the bio-paper.
"A lot of things are going to be a pain in the butt to print, but I think we can do livers and kidneys as well."
Prestwich guessed initial human organ printing may be five or 10 years away.
Once the stack is the right size -- maybe two centimeters' worth of sheets, each containing a ring of blots, for a tube resembling a blood vessel -- printing stops.
The stack is incubated in a bioreactor, where cells fuse with their neighbors in all directions.
The bio-paper works as a scaffold to support and nurture cells, and should be eaten away by them or naturally degrade, researchers said.
Though it can take less than two minutes to print a sheet of bio-paper with bio-ink, it can take about a week for such a tube to fuse, Forgacs said.
It's currently feasible to print tubes, Prestwich explained, because the printers output bio-paper in a sort of ever-ascending spiral, like a Slinky.
Helen Lu, director of the Biomaterials and Interface Tissue Engineering Laboratory at Columbia University, thinks organ printing could eventually work.
Still, she cautioned that scientists must determine additional details such as how blood vessels are formed in skin, because simply implanting them might not be optimal.
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