New Scientist: Print me a heart and a set of arteries
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 is amazing that it works and yet it seems like such a simple idea. It is probably many years off but with the advancements in 3D printing techniques couple with this technology then we could almost literally have new organs on demand.
Tags: science
