“Approximately 18 people die every day waiting for an organ transplant. But that may change someday sooner than you think — thanks to 3D printing,” Lucas Mearian reports for Computerworld. “Advances in the 3D printing of human tissue have moved fast enough that San Diego-based bio-printing company Organovo now expects to unveil the world’s first printed organ — a human liver — next year. ‘We have achieved thicknesses of greater than 500 microns, and have maintained liver tissue in a fully functional state with native phenotypic behavior for at least 40 days,’ said Mike Renard, Organovo’s executive vice president of commercial operations.”
“Organovo’s researchers were able to bring together fibroblasts and endothelial cells, which perform the function of developing tiny vascular networks, allowing the company to achieve thick tissue with good cell viability,” Mearian reports. “The liver tissue model that Organovo plans to release next year is for research use only and will be used in the laboratory for medical studies and drug research. That’s important in its own right: Developing a new drug costs, on average, $1.2 billion and takes 12 years.”
“The creation of a viable liver is a watershed moment for the bio-printing industry and medicine because it proves 3D printed tissue can be kept alive long enough to test the effects of drugs on it or implant it in a human body where it can further develop,” Mearian reports. “To spur on the development of bio-printed organs, the Methuselah Foundation, a Springfield, Va.-based not-for-profit that supports regenerative medicine research, this month announced a $1 million prize for the first organization to print a fully functioning liver.”
“While it may be a decade or more before human trials for organ transplants are approved by the FDA, the creation of organ tissue still holds the prospect of revolutionizing medicine. Printing out sustainable organ tissue could allow pharmaceutical companies to develop and test drugs on human and not animal organs. Using human tissue yields more accurate results,” Mearian reports. “Researchers are now experimenting with laying down a thin layer of human tissue from any number of organs for pharmaceutical development. The process is known as creating an ‘organ on a chip’ or a ‘human on a chip.’ …Earlier this year, researchers at Princeton University created a functional ear using a modified $1,000 ink-jet printer. They said the ear they created has the potential to hear radio frequencies far beyond the range of normal human capability because the tissue was combined with electronics as it grew in a petri dish.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: They should print out a brain for Ballmer.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Bill” for the heads up.]
Come on MDN, you know they don’t make printers that small.
Printing a brain for Ballmer would not solve his problem. Even with a brain they still would need a lot more room up there than Ballmer has with that thick skull of his.
What would be the point? He is clever enough to have initiated his exit on his own terms.
Now if you suggested a duplicate of his brain so that it can be transferred to the incoming CEO, I would be all for it, since we all know that Mr. Steve Ballmer is the best CEO Apple inc. never had!!!
This is no big deal.
Google and Microsoft have been producing assholes for years….
And proved the assholes were fully functional because they’ve produced real turds for years.
Normally, I would rant about how this generation, since about the year 2000 or so, was a bunch of entitled, spoiled brats, and how us children of the 1980s were more well behaved, but after seeing this, I may reconsider. This is some very sci-fi stuff and I remembered seeing something like this in the 2007 docudrama “2057”. They said that within 50 years, we would have things like 3D printed organs and other things like that. That documentary is only 6 years old. If we can accomplish so much in only 6 years, then I may have hope for this generation.
What the hell kind of ink does this printer use and how much does it cost????
It’s organic and expensive.
That is just some creepy sheeite.
That answers the question re: what ink to use to print a Ballmer “brain”.
I think it’d be more fitting for Eric Schmidt
Hurry up man. My liver’s pretty wrecked.
What, exactly does this have to do with Apple? If MDN posted this just to say that Ballmer has no brain, then that’s kinda childish to be honest.
True, but the children who visit this site need their amusements.
As a practicing toddler in my mind, I get all the amusement I need by throwing all my toys out of the pram and watching my parents and their friends pick them up and put them back in the pram!
MDN is simply throwing back in all the toys that we bloggers throw out to our utter amusement!! 🙂
Life is much to short Joey, perhaps it is time you left the shelter of your mothers pouch!
The other day, sometime this week i think, Apple filed a 3D printer patent.
Wether Apple will go into the organ printing business is another story.
Apple finds a small company doing 3d printer research. Buys them one year later, iOrgans is announced.
Apple stock hits 3000.
Just saying.
Actually it does have something to do with Apple, since OUR Steve’s death had to do with Pancreatic cancer and a Liver transplant. That was the first thing I thought of when I saw the headline. Too late for Steve Jobs damn it.
Just can’t imagine perhaps this tech could extend Steve Jobs’ live..
Ha! One of the best Mac Daily News “Take” comments, EVER!
I agree, but for different reasons. To print a healthy functional brain would be one of the greatest achievements of man since landing on the moon and could happen in our lifetime!
“MacDailyNews Take: They should print out a brain for Ballmer.”
They already have, it called a blank piece of paper ….. And it does not take a 3-D printer!
Hannibal Lecter’s dream 😉
exactly. But we wouldn’t have to kill any one to have dinner.
Memo to future Skynet Corporation: Don’t put a gap between its two front teeth.
Sources tell me that the test print pattern is a gall bladder.
hmmm. i wouldn’t otherwise be as interested but …i have a skillet that does onions.
We have achieved thicknesses of greater than 500 microns…
That’s half a millimeter. That doesn’t even approach the thickness, let along functionality of an actual liver. IOW: This is just another GEE WHIZ! science article with a bogus prediction. It’s interesting that cells can be laid down via ‘printing’ (a very pedestrian term for this process) and have them actually adhere to one another. But piles of cells are just piles of cells, even if they are hepatic cells. There’s a huge amount of research still to go before we even know if any actual ‘liver printing’ will ever be possible. So forget about 2014 prediction rubbish.
Bad Science: Standard fare in our era of the con-job culture.
Typo alert: “…let ALONE functionality of an actual liver.”
zzzz
If anyone wants a reasonable quality of life in the next century, humanity had better work on ways to stop runaway population growth instead of continuing to work for ever-increasing life spans, ever-greater fertility, and continuing to patch up the damaged & diseased. I know it’s politically incorrect, but humans are the only species that actually takes measures to avoid cleaning up the gene pool. Idiocracy is the result.
Man needs to come to grips with the reality that printing body parts, or cloning, is a means to a terrible future on a crowded planet.
Man’s contributions to cleansing the gene pool are genocide and total war. I’d have thought that was well understood.