Scientists "Print" Human Vein With 3D Printer 94
An anonymous reader writes "3D Printing technology has recently leapt into a new realm — we've seen printers that can create entire buildings out of stone, delicious meals out of simple ingredients, and now — perhaps weirdest and coolest of them all — a printer that can build body parts from cells!"
Those other things are really interesting... (Score:5, Informative)
Since TFS didn’t:
References: 3-D Printer Creates Entire Buildings From Solid Rock [inhabitat.com], MIT’s Digital Food Printer Creates Nutritious Meals [inhabitat.com]
At UWMC we've been making parts for years (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, we have been doing scaffolding work on various body parts for years, including livers and other organs.
The hard one is the heart - the cardiovascular veins are easier to replace one by one though.
It's Called Tissue Engineering (Score:3, Informative)
It's typically referred as Tissue Engineering [wikipedia.org] and it's been around for a while. Systems have been available for research purposes for a few years O.N.E. Technologies Material Deposition Systems [onelabs.com]
Re:At UWMC we've been making parts for years (Score:3, Informative)
I'd heard the scaffolding was going pretty well; taking pig organs, stripping away the cells with some kind of solvent, leaving the collagen-based scaffolding, then 'doping' the scaffold with the patient's cells to produce a perfect 'match' organ - with the success the doctors had with the South American woman a while ago (and more recently with a 10 yr old boy - http://www.bionews.org.uk/page_56929.asp) I'd hoped this kind of rejection-free organ replacement was *very* close to being more generally available.
Re:Fingerprints (Score:3, Informative)