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The first is three-dimensional (3D) bioprinting, which uses “bio-ink,” a printable material made from a patient’s own cells, to print layer upon layer, creating tissue that will not be rejected by the recipient. But in progressing from tissue to a complex organ, one critical challenge has been how to get blood to flow to keep the cells alive, and researchers have devised a number of approaches to this. They include threading tiny channels through the organ, where blood vessels develop when implanted in animals, or seeding channels with the endothelial cells that line the inside of blood vessels. A second...

A team of Brigham and Women's Hospital researchers have developed a way to bioprint tubular structures that better mimic native vessels and ducts in the body. The 3-D bioprinting technique allows fine-tuning of the printed tissues' properties, such as number of layers and ability to transport nutrients. These more complex tissues offer potentially viable replacements for damaged tissue. The team describes its new approach and results in a paper published on Aug. 23 in Advanced Materials. "The vessels in the body are not uniform," said Yu Shrike Zhang, PhD, senior author on the study and an associate bioengineer in BWH's...

Shortage of organs for transplantation has been one of the most challenging endeavor that patients, families and health care providers face today. But now, a possible novel answer to organ shortage has arrived: 3D printing of substitute organs. Numerous measures have been implemented to widen the pool of organ donors all across the U.S. Interventions to address the problem of organ shortage include national programs to heighten deceased donor donation, paired donor exchanges and split organ donation, among many others. Actions to hasten public awareness, enhance efficiency of donation mechanism and standardize donation policies have resulted in remarkable rates of...

Bioprinting, or the process of creating human tissues through 3D printers, is a highly contested area of technological innovation. Theoretically it could save the economy billions on a global scale, whilst boosting weak or war-torn countries' access to more affordable health care and provision, whether producing prosthetic limbs or highly customised fully-working human organs. From a technological perspective, the rise and development of 3D printing and its capabilities will play an undeniable part in our future lives. But how does the process work? UK-based company PrinterInks has teamed up with US startup Organovo, a company specialised in designing and printing...

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...