I'm Dr. Joshua Schwimmer, a nephrologist and internal medicine physician in New York City. • Kidney Notes was the first active nephrology blog. (Trivia: Kidney Notes is so old that the National Library of Medicine still uses it as an example of how to formally cite blogs.) • Professionally, you can find me at Kidney.nyc. • Kidney Notes is for educational purposes only, not medical advice. Consult qualified health care professionals. See disclaimer.

Monday, December 5, 2005

Printing Organs on Demand

Via Wired News:
Led by University of Missouri-Columbia biological physics professor Gabor Forgacs and aided by a $5 million National Science Foundation grant, researchers at three universities have developed bio-ink and bio-paper that could make so-called organ printing a reality.

Here's how it works: A customized milling machine prints a small sheet of bio-paper. This "paper" is a variable gel composed of modified gelatin and hyaluronan, a sugar-rich material. Bio-ink blots -- each a little ball of cellular material a few hundred microns in diameter -- are then printed onto the paper. The process is repeated as many times as needed, the sheets stacked on top of each other.

Once the stack is the right size -- maybe two centimeters' worth of sheets, each containing a ring of blots, for a tube resembling a blood vessel -- printing stops. The stack is incubated in a bioreactor, where cells fuse with their neighbors in all directions. The bio-paper works as a scaffold to support and nurture cells, and should be eaten away by them or naturally degrade, researchers said.
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