Jonathan Wilhoite Blog: A Major Stride In Medicine As Doctors Are Now 3D Printing Living Body Parts

Thursday, February 18, 2016

A Major Stride In Medicine As Doctors Are Now 3D Printing Living Body Parts

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Science has again taken a giant leap for mankind as evidence shows that doctors are now 3D printing living body parts in the field of regenerative medicine.

Researchers who discovered this breakthrough, as published recently in Nature Biotechnology, successfully implanted normal and fully-functional sections of cartilage, muscle and bone on animal test subjects.

This means that there is great hope in the future of making use of these living tissues to repair damaged parts of the body like a scarred heart muscle, a damaged ear or jaw or even possibly a vital organ.

But scientists are still facing a big hurdle in trying to keep cells alive especially those that are thicker than 0.2 millimetres- as the cell tissues become starved of essential oxygen and nutrients to keep them alive.

A research team at the Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center has developed a new process that 3D prints tissues that are printed with thousands of micro channels to allow essential nutrients to nourish the cell tissue to keep it alive.

Named as the Integrated Tissue and Organ Printing System (ITOP) – the contraption begins with a bio-degradable plastic- based material to form the structure of the body part and combines a water-based gel that contains the living cells to stimulate growth.

This process also allows nerves and blood vessels to grow in the implants as it creates an ideal environment to sustain normal cell regeneration and growth.

Close at the heels of this breakthrough in a similar field of science is the development of the Bio Assembly Tool (BAT) by the Cardiovascular Innovation Institute (CII) in Louisville, Kentucky.

A select team of researchers, doctors, technicians and students of the institute are going the arduous process of 3d bioprinting of a working human heart, where a part of this work is centered on a pioneering breakthrough in stem cell printing that could prove to give hope for regenerative science especially in the repair or replacement of damaged vital human organs, cells and tissues.

The scientific community is still divided on their views and opinions of these technological breakthroughs, primarily with ethical and moral principles that are centered on the use of stem cells and cloning processes, however, the developers agree that it could still remove doubts in the scientific communities once these are properly sorted out and explained.

But for now, many believe that there’s still a long way to go in perfecting this process which may soon prove to be the ray of hope for patients dealing with debilitating and complex injuries and illnesses, and now that doctors are now 3D printing living body parts, it may just be somewhere beyond the horizon within reach.

Source: Doctors 3D-print ‘living’ body parts – BBC News

Image Credit: Doctors 3D-print ‘living’ body parts

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