Bioengineers have been steadily advancing toward the goal of building lab-grown organs out of a patient’s own cells, but a few major challenges remain. One of them is making vasculature, the blood vessel plumbing system that delivers nutrients and remove waste from the cells on the inside of a mass of tissue. Without these blood vessels, interior cells quickly suffocate and die.
According to the United States Renal Data System, End-Stage Renal Disease resulted in over 90,000 deaths in 2009. Solving the problem has been difficult at best as treatment options aimed at dealing with renal disease are basically limited to organ transplantation or dialysis.
3D printing is becoming increasingly implemented in the operating room, with surgeons turning to the technology to create tailor-made implants for their patients. This time, surgeons at Southampton General Hospital have 3D printed a hip joint for 71-year-old Meryl Richards and have used her own stem cells to hold it in place.
Metamason is a new Southern California start-up looking to help people who suffer from sleep apnea create custom made CPAP masks designed for their specific face and comfort requirements.
3D printed cranial implants are not new, and the approval process has been a long one. Back in 2013 a cranial implant made news when the FDA approved the surgery on a US patient with an opaque material, and another was achieved using transparent resin on a Dutch patient. But this application of 3D printing is easily one of the most amazing — and one that makes a huge difference to people’s lives. Now a new case has emerged of the first cranial prosthesis 3D printed in Trabecular Titanium and implanted in a patient in Argentina.
Artificial tissue has always lacked a key ingredient: blood vessels. A new 3-D printing technique seems poised to change that.
Using a custom-built four-head 3-D printer and a “disappearing” ink, materials scientist Jennifer Lewisand her team created a patch of tissue containing skin cells and biological structural material interwoven with blood-vessel-like structures.Reported by the team in Advanced Materials, the tissue is the first made through 3-D printing to include potentially functional blood vessels embedded among multiple, patterned cell types.
3D printable organs are in the works, but one thing holding researchers back is the lack of a way to print reliable vascular networks within the organs. If the blood can’t flow through correctly, the printed organs will fail. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) believe they have found a way to produce dissolvable scaffolds that will create hollows within printable organs. Those hollows will mimic our own blood vessel networks and may be the key to successfully printing larger and more complex human organs for transplant.
A team of nanoengineers at the University of California, San Diego have published their work on a 3D printed device which functions much like the human liver to remove dangerous toxins from the blood.
3D printing has once again proven vital in the the preparation stages of a life saving surgery, as a five year old from Spain named Marc faced a tumor that doctors deemed risky to remove. Since the age of one, Marc has been diagnosed with a neuroblastoma, a common form of pediatric cancer. Normally operating on such a tumor can be relatively simple, but due to the network of blood vessels and arteries surrounding Marc’s growth, doctors at Hospital Sant Joan de Déu de Esplugues de Llobregat in Barcelona feared causing damage to his liver, kidney, and stomach.
Outdoor activities can bring a lot of enjoyment to people’s lives, and it can literally be devastating when the things we love most are no longer possible. Terry Gumbley, an active off-road runner and gardener, discovered this first hand when knee and ankle pain forced him to give up his favorite activities. Thanks to Peacocks Medical Group, with support from Materialise’s3-matic software, Terry ultimately received an orthotic that eliminated his pain, got him back on his feet, and enabled him to once more enjoy life and his garden.
The BIOFABRIS is a National Institute of S&T in Biomanufacturing of multidisciplinary,
located at the Chemical Engineering Campus of UNICAMP, character that aims to integrate computational tools, synthesis and development of new biomaterials and application of engineering techniques to obtain biomedical devices (prostheses and orthopedic orthoses) and substitutes for live biological tissues or defective or missing human organs.