3D Printing An Organ – Live Onstage at TED
Anthony Atala: Printing a human kidney
Well, we have been hearing about the 3D printing of organs for a while — and there are reports that a MakerBot Operator with a heavily modified Cupcake is engaging in this very work: printing plastic scaffolding for stem-cell “curing” of organs.1
Here is a great talk about the present practice and future potential of 3D bioprinting.
And here is a great link to read more about the program exploring this technology.
- Or as Marty in the Botcave has just said it — “rafting an organ on a 3D printer.” [↩]
| Tagged with | 3d printing, bioprinting, cupcake, kidney, organ, rafting an organ | 8 comments |
8 Comments so far
schmarty
This is probably the first blog post ever to be tagged “rafting an organ”.
Now this has me thinking about skeinforge algorithms for a dual-extruder with plastic and “organ gunk” toolheads.
Twotimes
If you click the link, it says that he printed a form for the kidney to grow in at the TED conference. He didn’t print an actual kidney. Still really cool!
Matt
That’s what Marty meant by “rafting an organ.” Still, essentially this is the 3D printing stage of manufacturing an organ, and it was more fun to label it this way.
Donald Pelton
As for “Rafting an Organ” I recall seeing where someone made a synthetic ear with real cloned cell skin.
Matt
And they used the term “rafting an organ?” Pretty interesting stuff. Well, there is also “grafting an organ.”
CLF
Is this truly a makerbot rp machine? Does anyone know if there have been any published articles outlining the use of this equipment for biomedical scaffold printing?
Matt
The 3D printer printing the kidney shell isn’t a MakerBot — but there are biotech teams who have purchased MakerBots and are using them in this sort of research. The thing is — a lot of this research is pretty close-door kinda stuff given that it is a hot direction for biotech, so these teams don’t tell us what they are doing. We only hear that they are doing this from the rumors passed back our way.
Toner Cartridge
I think, 3-D printers have the potential of creating many jobs and opportunities. but 3D printing materials for investment casting tend to yield sporadically rough surfaces.