photo: bodyworks
3-D printing is firing the imagination of scientists and engineers.
One of the more promising applications of the technology would be from the generation of a network of blood vessels that could one day replace damaged arterial networks in the human body that supply blood to vital organs such as kids, heart and liver. But also the creation of entire organs.
A presentation by Anthony Atala of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine in 2011 brought many people in the audience to complete awe.
As he was speaking a 3-D machine behind him hummed and honed some invisible material into an equally unknown shape.
Sometime later, a camera zoomed in onto the machine's creation and activity, only to reveal living cells grown in a laboratory, and plotting their internal structure layer by layer, based on a highly detailed 3-D digital matrix rendering.
The 3-D printing behind him, which does not look very different to what an ink jet operation does, used a solution of living cells.
When the machine finally finished, a life-size kidney made of human cells was created.
This of course is just the beginning of what seems to be the premise for a wonderful voyage into the creation of replacement organs and structures for the human body.
Source: Scientific American/ 4.5.13
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