3D printers are now changing the way we make our cars, homes and even our food. Now, thanks to the work of scientists at Stanford University, they can change the fate of patients awaiting organs for transplant.
Mark Skylar-Scott and his team of bioengineers have developed a technique that allows them to 3D print living heart tissue. The goal is to achieve the ability to print very important parts that can actually grow with a patient in the future, such as heart valves and ventricles.
As the researchers note, approximately one in 100 children in the United States is born with a heart defect. Although they can get transplants, these transplants can be rejected by the body after 20 or 30 years. Bioprinting of a new organ using a patient’s own cells can reduce these incidences.
“This is an ambitious goal, but we believe many key building blocks are in place to start a project like this one,” says Skylar-Scott.
The technique used is an example of bioprinting, a process that uses living cells to create organ-like structures. While the definition of bioprinting is not a new concept, it often involves a very slow process and often requires printing one cell at a time. So even if 1,000 cells are printed per second, it takes more than a thousand years to create a single human heart.
Skylar-Scott and her team developed a method by which they can speed up the process by printing clusters of thousands of cells, called organoids. “We’re taking millions of these and condensing them into a human stem cell mayonnaise that we can then print out,” the statement said.
Once the cells are printed, they take the form of general tissue in which networks of blood vessels can be printed.
Already the team has succeeded in printing a tube-like structure similar to a human vessel that can basically pump liquids on its own. The next step would be to print a larger structure such as a functional chamber that could be grafted onto an existing heart. Skylar-Scott said she thinks that in as little as five years’ future, a heart valve printed using this technique could be implanted into a human patient, but we’re probably at least twenty years away from a fully printed heart.
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