You've heard of 3-D-printed iPhone cases. But we may not be too far from seeing 3-D-printed human organs, writes David Mattin.
It has been almost 60 years since Dr Joseph E Murray successfully performed the first human organ transplant. In December 1954, Murray transplanted a kidney from the 23-year-old Ronald Herrick to his identical twin, Richard, who was dying of chronic nephritis. The transplant extended Richard's life by eight years.
Murray - who later won the Nobel Prize - died in November. But in the intervening years, he'd watched his pioneering work on organ transplant transform the medical sciences, offering hope to thousands with previously untreatable illnesses. Now, new technologies may soon push organ transplant forward in ways Murray, surely, never dreamt about.
This new technology is being called biofabrication and its ultimate aim is the 3-D printing of entire human organs. Traditional 3-D printing is a machine process in which an ultra-fine nozzle extrudes particles - usually of plastic or metal - and micro-layer by micro-layer creates a 3-D object. Biofabrication adopts this process but uses living cells rather than plastic or metal as its building blocks.
Biofabrication scientists have already 3-D-printed human blood vessels using stem cells first cultured in a lab to grow into blood vessel cells and loaded them into a 3-D bioprinter. Because the stem cells are taken from the patient who will receive the blood vessels, it's hoped that rejection of the new vessels will be unlikely. Now scientists plan to put the blood vessels through human clinical trials to prove that it is functional and able to grow, paving the way to a future in which damaged blood vessels can be treated with 3-D-printed replacements.
But this is just the start of a revolution that scientists hope will one day see the ultimate in personalised medicine: bespoke organ printing.
The San-Diego-based medical firm Organovo (
), credited with creating the world's first commercially viable organ printers in 2010, has partnered with the design software maker Autodesk to further its research.
And now, a team of scientists led by Wenmiao Shu at Herriot-Watt University in Scotland have taken a crucial step forward by creating a 3-D bioprinter delicate enough to print human stem cells in an ordered pattern. Those cells can be programmed to turn into any kind of cell in the human body, so the ability to print with them takes us closer to entire, functional 3-D-printed organs. In the meantime, there's a more immediate benefit: Shu and his team plan to print 3-D liver tissue to use in drug trials. If the technique is extended to other kinds of tissue, too - heart, lung, bone, etc - the need for non-human subjects on which to test new medicines may be eliminated.
We're tantalisingly close to a revolutionary new medical technology. Scientists at Organovo estimate that we are just 10 years away from functional, usable 3-D-printed organs, meaning that the first person to be given a 3-D-printed heart walks among us now (and, in fact, is probably already middle-aged). Once that moment arrives, the terrible calculus that is a part of current organ donation - which sees a large pool of patients in dire circumstances ranked against one another in competition for a small number of organs - will be consigned to history. Stand by for the age of organs on demand.
David Mattin is lead strategist at
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