Bioprinting and Tissue Engineering: The Future of Organ Transplants
William Browning, Yahoo! Contributor Network
Bioprinting is a relatively new form of technology whereby biological cells are heaped upon each other in a specific pattern much in the same way many tiny dots of ink come together to form text on a paper. Don’t expect a new heart to magical appear in a few seconds after pressing “Print” on your computer screen. For now the technology is in the rudimentary stages of testing. There are many aspects of bioprinting that can be useful in the medical field.
Tissue Engineering
In 2006, Nanotech Buzz published an article about a University of Missouri at Columbia biophysicist that was able to create heart tissue for a chicken simply by layering the proper cells upon each other through micropipettes. Dr. Gabor Forgacs had created a way to have droplets of biological matter fuse together when placed next to each other. Interspersed with the biological cells is a gel-like substance to give the tissue shape while it builds itself up into a more stable form.
Eventually, the mechanics of bioprinting such cells became faster thanks to a company called Sciperio. Within 19 hours, layers of chicken heart cells began to beat in sync with each other like a heart is supposed to behave.
Newer Techniques
Other laboratories are building on that initial bioprinting research and taking it forward. Wired magazine reports on July 11, 2010, that a company in San Diego can grow human blood vessels using this technique in several weeks’ worth of time. Organovo is leading the way with this new tissue engineering technology.
Much in the same way the chicken heart cells were made, Organovo takes cells needed to make a blood vessel and puts them together layer by layer like a printer. The beauty of the process becomes clear when you consider that these blood vessels are custom made for the person who will use them. The sources of the cells for this tissue engineering project are the person’s own donor cells. The blood vessels are grown from there.
Scientists can take this bioprinting process one step further. Consider using stem cells to grow organs layer by layer and you have an entirely new way of making organs for future use or replacement. If there are cells available from the patient who needs the replacement then there will be no need for organ donor lists any more.
Legal obstacles to getting approval to grow entire organs will surely be massive. As more and more research and testing is done hopefully companies like Organovo and Sciperio can gradually make strides in showing how useful tissue engineering as a science can be. Human testing of drugs could also be conducted upon cells if they are engineered in the laboratory instead of using a living human being. Encouraging other things such as cord blood donation may also be useful when developing a strategy for how best to utilize tissue engineering or bioprinting in the future should the science progress further.
For now, bioprinting is in the early stages. Human blood vessels are relatively small and the layers of tissues that have worked together so far are millimeters thick. Entire organ engineering is still decades away but the initial science behind such a task are moving forward very quickly. Maybe in twenty years the science and ethics of such projects will be equal to the task of moving medical science forward to a new frontier that can come from bioprinting.
Nanotech Buzz and Wired were my main sources of information. Further reading can be found at the Organovo website as well as the University of Missouri’s Organprint Lab website.
