3D Printed Body Parts

Doctors 3D-print custom-made, living body parts using a technology that has been described as "goose that really does lay golden eggs."

17:21 17 February 2016

A team at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Centre has developed a new technique that 3D-prints a tissue that has the ability to penetrate nutrients, addressing previous challenge of keeping the cells alive as they starved of oxygen. The technology, which has been described as a “goose that really does lay golden eggs”, raises the hope of using living tissues to repair broken parts of the body.

 

Previously 3D-printed sections of bone, muscle and cartilage were trialed and have functioned normally when implanted into animals.

 

The Integrated Tissue and Organ Printing System combines a biodegradable plastic which gives the 3D-printed sections their structure and a water-based gel, which contains the cells and encourages them to grow. When the structures were implanted into animals, the plastic broke down and was replaced by a natural, structural “matrix” of proteins produced by the cells.

 

The lead researcher of the study, Prof Anthony Atala, said that tissues that can be used on humans can now also be printed.

"Let's say a patient presented with an injury to their jaw bone and there's a segment missing.

 

"We'd bring the patient in, do the imaging and then we would take the imaging data and transfer it through our software to drive the printer to create a piece of jawbone that would fit precisely in the patient."

 

"In this study we printed a wide range of tissue strengths - from muscles as a soft tissue to cartilage and bone as a hard tissue showing a whole range of tissue strengths is possible.

 

"The hope is to continue work on these technologies to target other humans tissues as well."