Here'a a unique application for print:
Need a skin graft? A new trachea? A heart patch? Turn on your printer, and let it spit one out.
A group of researchers hope printers' whirs and buzzes will soon be saving lives.
Led by University of Missouri-Columbia biological physics professor Gabor Forgacs and aided by a $5 million National Science Foundation grant, researchers at three universities have developed bio-ink and bio-paper that could make so-called organ printing a reality.
Huh?
A customized milling machine prints a small sheet of bio-paper. This "paper" is a variable gel composed of modified gelatin and hyaluronan, a sugar-rich material. Bio-ink blots -- each a little ball of cellular material a few hundred microns in diameter -- are then printed onto the paper. The process is repeated as many times as needed, the sheets stacked on top of each other.
Once the stack is the right size -- maybe two centimeters' worth of sheets, each containing a ring of blots, for a tube resembling a blood vessel -- printing stops. The stack is incubated in a bioreactor, where cells fuse with their neighbors in all directions. The bio-paper works as a scaffold to support and nurture cells, and should be eaten away by them or naturally degrade, researchers said.
Though it can take less than two minutes to print a sheet of bio-paper with bio-ink, it can take about a week for such a tube to fuse, Forgacs said.
It's currently feasible to print tubes, Prestwich explained, because the printers output bio-paper in a sort of ever-ascending spiral, like a Slinky.
With my luck I'd run out of ink halfway through. And do we really want the "Printer not found" error message to be a matter of life-and-death? Talk about a "fatal error"!
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