You’ve probably heard about the 3-D printer at some point in the past few years. I haven’t exactly been keeping up with it, but the word on the street is that these machines can make spoons, angel hair pasta, sculptures, airplane parts, children’s toys, and pretty much everything in between.

Not surprisingly, scientists have been researching this new technology as well. A huge breakthrough was made about twelve years ago, when a mold of a bladder was printed, seeded with a patient’s own cells, transplanted back into the 12-year-old patient, and worked perfectly. More recently, surgeon Anthony Atala discussed the need for (and implications of) organ printing in his TED Talk: “Currently, there are not enough organs to go around; in fact, in the last 10 years the number of patients requiring organs has doubled while in the same time the number of donors has barely gone up.” He described 3-D printers as pretty much cotton candy machines that can spin and weave fibers into different shapes from raw material. These structures can have the patient’s cells scattered on them, which would eventually grow into a new organ.

A printed protein scaffold that has been seeded with liver cells. (Screen capture from the TED Talk)

Prototype of a kidney printed by Dr. Atala. It’s still years away from being functional, but it’s definitely an interesting development. (Screen capture from the TED Talk)

So what are some implications of making new organs with 3-D printing, besides the obvious (transplants)? Since we could have a real, live human organ that reacts to chemicals just as an organ would in the human body, this would theoretically eliminate the need for animal testing because we can test how a drug works on human tissue instead of live lab animals. Of course, this technology is still very much under development and right now, it would be impossible to produce organs fast enough or accurately enough to experiment on them. But the 3-D printer was really a brilliant invention, and it will hopefully be used to do some awesome things for science.

Sources:

http://www.ted.com/talks/anthony_atala_printing_a_human_kidney.html

http://www.businessnewsdaily.com/4743-odd-things-3d-printing.html

http://www.dvice.com/2013-11-12/3d-printed-human-flesh-could-replace-animal-testing