Not totally functional yet, but a step towards the future.
For a long time, organ transplants have been a bottleneck for certain medical procedures. For everyone that needs a replacement, you need one donated. And since a lot of them are of the sort you need to live, much of the time, you have to wait for someone to die.
Dovetailing into that, Tel Aviv University has managed to successfully 3D print a complete heart: cells, blood vessels, ventricles and chambers and all. This is a massive improvement over previous attempts, which could only grow more simple tissues.
They started with a biopsy of fatty tissue from a patient. The tissue was then used as the material for the print job. Granted, the heart in question isn’t the size of a full human heart; it’s roughly the size of a rabbit’s heart. But, post trials, the method and technology used could certainly advance to full sized hearts, and possibly other organs. That said, the hearts they’ve made are currently only able to contract; the researchers plan on culturing them and “teaching” them to function like the real deal. The next step after that is transplantation into animal models.
Printing tissue to create organs has been a big goal in medical fields for well over a decade. And it seems lke the gol, while still distant, may be in sight. The researchers at Tel Aviv Universty hypothesize that within 10 years, hospitals could have functioning organ printers on hand.
Source: Engadget
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