Printing working 3D Body Parts already being done.

I record "Wired Science" on PBS cable. It is from the Los Angeles PBS. They showed a segment of re-growing body parts on humans like some animals can. Then they also showed a small heart being printed using a hacked standard printer. They put reproduced heart cells in the toner cartridge and printed out a small heart. Within four minuets later it started beating. This is not a joke; you can find info about it here.
[www.pbs.org]


Video showing printer about 3/4th the way through.
[www.pbs.org]

Too Cool!

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/19/2007 10:04AM by Cheap!.

That, my friend, is flipping awesome! It's amazing to see the tech we've been talking about here in the forums being put to use to print cells. Wow. Makes you stop and think.

Demented

That is really cool. On a side note PBS is showing their visit to Maker Fair tonight at 8pm on the east coast. Not sure if it is the same for other areas.

Edit: After looking at their site the Make Fair show is not listed as being on tonight. I saw a comercial that said Wednesday at 8pm. Maybe I have the wrong Wednesday.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/19/2007 10:48AM by Squintz.

I think I may be on that show. I was interviewed by Niya. My interview lasted two hours but I know most of it will end up on the cutting room floor, so to speak. It was about converting a Prius into a Plug-in Hybrid to reduce it daily need for gas, and to reduce the green house gas it produces. I get over 100 MPG in mine and on the weekends I don

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/19/2007 11:00AM by Cheap!.

One more thought on this

now I might be able to get a brain after all??

... that's the interesting point!

It's actually no real problem to print living cells in 3D-shapes to form body-parts ...

It's possible too, make embedded blood-capilaries, basic bone-structures and so on ...

But if you want to insert the 'intelligence' we need in form of nerves and some complexer systems (hormon-sensors and -sources, liver-like biochemistry), then it's a long way, until you can update or replace more sophusticated parts

Viktor

oh well then I am back to working on my human USB interface

[blog.makezine.com]

Bruce

That's great. Personally, I figure the real medical test will be to make a kidney or a lung with a rapid prototyper. Beyond that, imagine an eye replacement, or even an aftermarket improvement. (Think squid eye, with the optic nerve BEHIND the retina, or that reflective layer in the back of a cats eye...or both.)

Darn it, I want a few new organs now, and they all work.

The future of doping scandals. Athletes caught using improved organs in professional, and olympic, sports.

So, when can I get my third arm to help improve my ski-boxing...

When they figure out how to interface it with the brain you have, which is trained to work four limbs.

However...

[www.acfnewsource.org]

Perhaps not all that long after someone grows the first replacement limb.

Well, the problem with printing organs is the enormous number of cell types(ink colors so to say) needed. There are 210 distinct cell types in the human body, in order to print an organ you need to grow the cells in a tissue culture(which can take months). You also need to obtain each needed cell type with a biopsy needle.(ouch!) Of course, there is always directed cell differentiation, but that is currently under research.

In order to grow cells in a tissue culture you usually have to immortalize them with a virus, which means that they can cause cancer if implanted. Tissue culture also tends to take a long time, because the culture lacks a circulatory system. In order to get a circulatory system you have to build one in with a 3d printer, which brings us back to step one. Of course, new methods are being developed to coerce capillary formation in cell cultures.

Another method for producing tissue cultures is to grow the cells on plastic beads in a large bioreactor, where growth media is pumped through the plastic beads serving the purpose of a circulatory system. This can be carried out on a very massive scale, so aftermarket body parts might be possible after all(that is if they can they can figure out a way to stop rejection).

The biggest problem with 3d printing of organs is the high temperature of the print head, which cells don't tend to like. That and the fact that our genetic code is poorly documented and setup like a kludge.

But, overall, 3d printing of organs has great implications and all engineering problems seem solvable within the next 10 years or so. 3d printing of organs might also have some interesting implications for reprap. Recently, someone came up with a way to use kidney cells to generate electricity.

... i already see someone printing a compound of heart-cells and piezoelectric micro-particles to form a 'living' powersource, you only have to feed with sugar and oxgene

Viktor

Kidney cell batteries are simpler though, kidney cells will normally transfer ions to one side of membrane creating an electric current.

Hi gene hacker,

... true, my 'heart-beat-powersource' with nano-PZT's is a funny example, but there are some serious developments embedding PZT-actuators into shoe-soles and clothing, so you produce electricity every time you move your arms or walk ...

Viktor

there's also a slab of lab-grown rat brain in a petri dish, that has been taught to fly an f22 flight simulator... [www.sciencedaily.com] - what rights do you give to a lab-grown animal brain in a homing missile?

my other thought on the printing of organs, is that with the same technology you could also print a steak... morality-free synthetic meat... yum

Hi deadgenome,

... the printing of food is my favorite - but when thinking, where to source, then etic points should be discussed ...

What's with a 'personal' meat-source?

Imagine a 'synthesizer' which you initialize with a small probe of your own cells, which prints steacks and other 'living' food absolutely compatible with your biochemistry is this a sort of cannibalism?

I think it's much better and safer assimilating 'your own' genome, then copied ones from different animals (or plants too?)

Viktor

have you ever read the Ian M Banks short story 'the state of the art' in which visitors from 'the culture' visit earth and towards the end of the story hold a banquet in earth's honour in which they serve meat made from the cultured cells of a variety of earth's politicians and celebrities that they had sampled without the knowledge of the donors... I could be mistaken, cos it's been nearly ten years since I read it and I don't have a copy to hand, but from what I recall, Idi Amin was supposed to be delicious...

for the record, my favourite ship name is 'Just Another Victim Of The Ambient Morality'

I'd be a bit concerned about prions when eating reprapped long-pig.
As for the sampling. If you're reproducing a lost limb, or other organ, theoretically, you could tease apart the mangled one for the culture samples to use.

And as for what rights you assign a "lab grown animal brain" in a homing missile...the right to fulfill its purpose.

As far as rejection. If they're your own cells, or cultured from your own cells, wouldn't tissue rejection be a moot point?

As for immortal cells. What about culturing the telomerase in E-Coli, (which should have it already,) and using hollowed out retroviri, minus the replication code, to implant it. Not change the DNA of the cells to make them immortal. Just patch them up a bit so they live longer.
Heck. Could you use DMSO and skip the virus?

Just thought about the high temperature issue for printing cells, surely this is only true in thermal injets and not piezoelectric ones, in fact it must be a piezo inkjet that they are using, cos I can't imagine that cells like being fired around by steam explosions.

You know. You could probably fire an ice cube from a steam cannon, if you didn't leave both in the breach for too long.

admittedly, you might only be raising them by a fraction of a degree, rather than cooking them... depends on how much heat they conduct from the steam explosion in the print head. I still thing piezo heads are likely to work better for this application.. I'm gonna go back over the video and see if I can identify the printer model they are using and look up what print heads it has & see if I'm wrong.. I like it when I'm proved wrong

He He He!

I have to think at the Battle Angel Alita Last Order Manga where a Biotech-Company from the venus has collected tissue samples of the great Karate Fighter Zekka, and used these samples to create many different Products like Zekka-Beer Zekka-Meat and so on.
Zekka himself was very uppset to hear about that.

That printer in the video is a thermal type inkjet printer and the firing circuitry is modified from a "normal" thermal inkjet printer to match the microboiling temperature of the cellular solution.
Boiling the cells to death is a major issue with this type of bioprinting, but
it is the cheapest, easiest way to do the experiments. Essentially you are
relying on the liquid holding the cells in suspension to have a much lower
boiling point than cellular damage occurs at. The liquid microboils and blows
the cell(s) out during the process.

Piezo heads are another way to do cell printing which get you past the temperature problem, but introduce a pressure wave issue where the cells
can be killed or ripped apart like a giant shoe squashing an ant. Piezo heads
also clog up a lot easier and once they clog with cells, they break. Another
issue with piezo heads is that the circuitry to run the heads is never given
out by the companies - so modifying the firing parameters to match cell tolerance means you have to reverse engineer the system.