I was SO excited to get my first 3D printer. I wasn't part of the first wave of people who bought wildly expensive prototype printers, but by the time I got one of my own, the printers had come a long way. I hopped into printing designs like a dragon that had intricate plastic joints. The whole thing could ripple like a wave right off the printer!
The technology has only become more advanced. Builders are 3D-printing houses with concrete. Restaurants are 3D-printing beautiful layered desserts by using food paste, chocolate, and sugar in the extruder.
3D printing has surged into medical uses as well. 3D printed prosthetics can be tailor-made to fit each unique patient. Invisalign announced that they are switching over to 3D printers to build their clear retainers.
But what about actual body parts? Could 3D printers be used to construct organs and tissues made of living cells? The answer: yes!
A team of scientists in South Korea just crossed a milestone that would have been impossible 10 years ago. They constructed a fully functional cornea of a human eye using a 3D printer! The team has recreated the shape, flexibility, and clarity of the cornea. No humans have received these corneas yet, but early testing is going very well.
What kind of material do scientists use to print a cornea? The answer is a gel called "bioink." The bioink starts as living tissue from a cornea donor, then most of the cell material is stripped out. What's left over are structural proteins and biomolecules. The 3D printer can shape this material into a frame to support the new tissue, then stem cells are used to regrow the cells inside the frame.
The science of bioprinting new organs is coming at just the right time, because traditional organ transplants are a tough process. Some patients wait years for a donor organ to be available. If they do become an organ recipient, after the surgery, they need heavy medications to keep their bodies from rejecting the unfamiliar organ.
Bioprinting organs should make this process much faster and easier. For example, the tissue of a single donated cornea can be used to print 300 new corneas, drastically cutting down on the waiting period. Other organs could be grown with the patient's natural tissues, which means no heavy-duty drugs needed after a replacement.
3D-printing body parts looks very promising, but there are still some hurdles. One challenge is keeping the printed tissue alive. Organs need a fine network of blood vessels to provide oxygen to the cells inside. Scientists also need to get creative when printing larger organs so they don't collapse on themselves before they can be used.
These two graphs highlight the struggle of the current organ transplant process:
Here are some questions I'd have looking at this graph:
💡Look at the scale of the Y axis on both graphs. How are the Y axis values different? Why is this necessary?
💡Look at the total number of people needing a kidney in 2023 - 2024 (either waiting for or receiving one). What percentage of people needing a kidney received one in this time?
💡You are an engineer working for a bioprinting company. Based on the data, which organ would make the most sense in trying to build? Why do you say so?