BioQuakes

AP Biology class blog for discussing current research in Biology

Printing More Than Just Pictures

3-D printing is an increasingly accessible technology that is bringing manufacturing into the home. Now these marvels of technology are being used in medicine. With children growing rapidly, expensive prosthetics are not an option for most families. Customized 3-D printed prosthetics are becoming more common and are helping out these families by making prosthetics less expensive.

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3-D Printed Prosthetic Hand

Usually, 3-D printers only print hard material such as plastic and metal. This is very useful while creating bone replacements and customizable prosthetics, but is not ideal for printing organic tissue.

Bioprinting, or the printing of organic tissues, is a rising and feasible option in medical treatments. This advance would be a huge improvement to many practices such as medical testing and organ transplants. The ability to print organic tissue would eliminate the need for long donor list that many people wait on, but never receive an organ. With bioprinting doctors would be able to test their medicine on organic human tissue rather than animals. This all may sound like science fiction, however it is happening right now.

Carnegie Mellon recently bought a commercial 3-D printer for around 1,000 dollar and after some modifications began to print soft materials. Associate professor at Carnegie Mellon Adam Feinberg and others have developed a way to print soft materials in-expensively. The main problem with printing soft materials is the prints would collapse on the weight of itself. To prevent this the researchers at Carnegie Mellon created a process they now call FRESH (Freeform Reversible Embedding of Suspended Hydrogels). In this process the nozzle prints with a gel inside a petri dish filled with a supportive gel. Then they heat up the petri dish and the supportive gel melts away leaving the print.

As this technology is open source and inexpensive, hopefully many patients will be receiving their very own custom printed organs soon.

 

Original Articles:

http://news.discovery.com/tech/biotechnology/hearts-and-arteries-could-be-3d-printed-cheaply-151026.htm

http://www.cnbc.com/2015/11/02/bioprinting-the-new-frontier-in-medicine-that-makes-human-tissue.html

More Information:

http://lifesciences.ieee.org/articles/feature-articles/332-printing-body-parts-a-sampling-of-progress-in-biological-3d-printing

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1 Comment

  1. agman

    Thank you for this article!!! The scientific world has really been changed by Bio-printing 🙂 I found an article that summarizes all the body parts they have made! They once made a kidney, How incredible!!??

    You can access the article here: http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v32/n8/fig_tab/nbt.2958_F3.html

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