Digital Journal — You’ve been shooting back whiskey your whole life and your liver is screaming for mercy. Knowing how uncomfortable a liver transplant could be, you opt for a safer route: Drop some cells off at the doctor’s office and wait for a machine to manufacture a new liver designed for your body.
Welcome to the future of tissue engineering, where that new organ could be designed with the unlikeliest of tools: An inkjet printer.
“This could have the same kind of impact that Gutenberg’s press did,” says Vladimir Mironov, director of the Shared Tissue Engineering Laboratory at the Medical University of South Carolina. Spearheaded by Mironov, a team of scientists has configured inkjet printers to shoot out proteins instead of ink, using thermoreversible gel instead of paper to capture the 3D tissue.
Thomas Boland, an assistant bioengineering professor at Clemson University, modified the printer and he says “printing a nose isn’t so far off. Cartilage uses only one cell type.” Mironov adds that a printed nose could take only five minutes to create.
While the scientists — the first to print living tissue — have already built hamster ovaries, printing complex organs like livers is years away. But not impossible, thanks to this intriguing breakthrough.
“We always need a harmonious vascular tree,” remarks Mironov, alluding to a biology-class term of tissue tubes common throughout the body. By printing these tubes in an area as large and sensitive as
a human organ, scientists can pass the first step in organ regeneration.
As eerie as this Face/Off scenario sounds, Mironov underlines the positive impacts: Organ transplants can be replaced by tissue-engineering technology; testing drugs on printed organs can sidestep the ethical issue of using humans as guinea pigs; and tissue engineering can be the new plastic surgery, allowing someone to print Madonna’s nose — if she’s willing to donate her cells.
With the benefits outlined, Mironov excitedly dives into an explanation on the printing process, dropping words like “aggregates” and “prototyping.” Essentially, ink cartridges are filled with clumps of living cells and what’s called smart gel. The printer nozzle prints the cells and gel, which serves as the paper, and then the cells fuse to form tubes — 3D structures unseen in any petri dish procedure. The smart gel is later cooled, then washed away to leave only cells behind. Special software quarterbacks the process.
“When I first saw how exact the cells lined up in 3D space,” Mironov says, “I said, ‘Wow! Now that’s a solution.’” Mironov adds a chilling concept: “Once we learn how to produce isolated body parts, we could eventually be able to build a whole body.”
The science community recognizes the tissue-engineering work as an innovative path to futuristic health care. Mironov was a finalist for a World Technology Award, in the health and medicine category, and Mironov and Boland were invited to an Orlando symposium to speak on organ printing.
Optimistic that his work will shake up fields like stem-cell research and nanotechnology, Mironov believes cell printers will be as commonplace as microscopes. “This is a friendly technology that poses no ethical problems,” he says. “The only question is not when progress will be made, but where the money is going to come from.” Like all scientific innovations, funding is the force that keeps the research and development flowing; unfortunately for Mironov et al., grants and private donors aren’t stepping forward.
One saving grace is the inexpensive printers implemented in this delicate process. Instead of using the newest models, the tissue-engineering team has chosen Hewlett-Packard’s 600 series, a 10-year-old model. The reason? Bigger print nozzles.
Science is not as complex as you thought it was. And that fresh, alcohol-free liver is not as unlikely as you thought it would be.
