Posted on 04/14/2006 8:51:17 AM PDT by Neville72
SITTING in a culture dish, a layer of chicken heart cells beats in synchrony. But this muscle layer was not sliced from an intact heart, nor even grown laboriously in the lab. Instead, it was "printed", using a technology that could be the future of tissue engineering.
Gabor Forgacs, a biophysicist at the University of Missouri in Columbia, described his "bioprinting" technique last week at the Experimental Biology 2006 meeting in San Francisco. It relies on droplets of "bioink", clumps of cells a few hundred micrometres in diameter, which Forgacs has found behave just like a liquid.
This means that droplets placed next to one another will flow together and fuse, forming layers, rings or other shapes, depending on how they were deposited. To print 3D structures, Forgacs and his colleagues alternate layers of supporting gel, dubbed "biopaper", with the bioink droplets. To build tubes that could serve as blood vessels, for instance, they lay down successive rings containing muscle and endothelial cells, which line our arteries and veins. "We can print any desired structure, in principle," Forgacs told the meeting.
Other tissue engineers have tried printing 3D structures, using modified ink-jet printers which spray cells suspended in liquid (New Scientist, 25 January 2003, p 16). Now Forgacs and a company called Sciperio have developed a device with printing heads that extrude clumps of cells mechanically so that they emerge one by one from a micropipette. This results in a higher density of cells in the final printed structure, meaning that an authentic tissue structure can be created faster.
Cells seem to survive the printing process well. When layers of chicken heart cells were printed they quickly begin behaving as they would in a real organ. "After 19 hours or so, the whole structure starts to beat in a synchronous manner," says Forgacs.
Most tissue engineers trying to build 3D structures start with a scaffold of the desired shape, which they seed with cells and grow for weeks in the lab. This is how Anthony Atala of Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and his colleagues grew the bladders which he successfully implanted into seven people (New Scientist, 8 April 2006, p 10). But if tissue engineering goes mainstream, faster and cheaper methods will be a boon. "Bioprinting is the way to go," says Vladimir Mironov, a tissue engineer at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston.
Yes, you are...
"Am I the only one this creeps out?"
I guess we all view things like this through our own filter.
I've got a close friend who was just diagnosed with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. It's untreatable and fatal. At the end you suffocate. Normal life expectancy after diagnosis is 5-6 years though he may have a bit longer because they caught his very early. Ten years at the most is probably all he's got. He'll need replacement lungs.
I view advances like this, not as "creepy" though I see your point, but as potentially terrific news for my friend and many millions of others.
It really is amazing. The interesting thing is that some ink jet technology uses micelles for encapsulating ink. Structurally, they are very analagous to biological cells. So if the micelles can be deposited, why not living cells? I guess it was just a matter of time before biology and printer technology were synthesized together like this. It's a wonderful example of the evolution of a new process from unifying two distinct technological realms!
Imagine extending that scenario. You could stay healthy and young looking for virtually forever, but your brain goes senile. Imagine a geriatric ward where everyone is in great physical shape, everyone looks like gorgeous 20 somethings but all have Alzheimers.
Don't use the brain labeled ABNORMAL...........
In a few years, I imagine they'll be able to print out the whole chicken. After a few days the cells will settle down and it'll jump off the output tray and strut across the room, pecking the floor, looking for seed. Meet Frankenchicken. Or, an easier task, print out a juicy, perfectly roasted rare prime rib. The potential applications are endless. It shouldn't creep you out at all, but instead make you giggle -- in a demented, insane asylum sort of way. ;-)
Does that mean Bill and Hillary will be around forever!!!.....AAAAAAAAAGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHH
A friend of mine, on May 15th, is giving one of her Kidney's to her best friend.....that is what I first thought of when I saw your post.....that and the thought of CERTAIN people living forever.
Lol, yes, that's what I had in mind. Maybe they could figure out how to replace your brain a piece at a time, after half-a-dozen visits to the brain printing factory, say? That way, you could feel like you weren't just being copied with the original being tossed in the dumpster.
But I thought it said Abby Normal....
Actually this reminds me of the scene in "The Fifth Element" with Bruce Willis and Milla Jovovich when they re-create her just from a hand that was recovered from a crash.
Of course the printer is cheap... it's the ink that gets your $$$ in the end... LOL
Still pretty cool...
neat
Oh, you beat me to it bad. ROTFLMAO!
Sounds like Hollywood....
LOL...why not just print out the McNuggets directly.
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