Researchers closing in on printing 3-D hearts
The artificial organ would need no anti-rejection drugs because it would use cells derived from a patient's fat.
(Photo: Michael Clevenger, The Courier-Journal, Louisville, Ky.)
LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Researcher Stuart Williams is not talking about a far-off, science-fiction effort when he describes how scientists here will create new, functioning human hearts — using cells and a 3-D printer.
The project is among the most ambitious in the growing field of three-dimensional printing that some say could revolutionize medicine.
"We think we can do it in 10 years — that we can build, from a patient's own cells, a total 'bioficial' heart," said Williams, executive and scientific director of the Cardiovascular Innovation Institute. The institute is a collaboration between the University of Louisville and the Jewish Heritage Fund for Excellence.
Known for creating products as diverse as car parts and action figures, 3-D printing also is being used to create models of human bones and organs, medical devices, personalized prosthetics and now, human tissues. Williams describes the process as taking a three-dimensional structure "and essentially cloning it, using a printer."
"Bioprinting is pretty much done everywhere," said Dr. Anthony Atala, director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine in North Carolina where scientists recently won an award for innovations in bioprinting. "Our ultimate goal is increasing the number of patients who get organs."
Earlier this month, officials announced that a baby's life had been saved when a 3-D printed device from the University of Michigan — a specially designed splint — restored his breathing. The case was recently featured in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Here, Williams and his colleagues recently created and implanted parts of hearts in mice as part of their heart-printing research. And University of Kentucky scientists have used the technology to grow new ulna bones in rabbits and make numerous models of human parts for teaching and surgery planning.
Eventually, scientists across the globe hope printing tissues and organs from patients' cells can eliminate the danger of rejection and the persistent shortage of transplant organs. Atala said that may be years away, and scientists face a number of challenges, such as replicating the complexity of blood vessels.
But Bill Gregory of the UK Center for Visualization and Virtual Environments expressed the optimism of many scientists, saying that, in the future, "You'll be able to custom-make parts and get them when you need them."
Human parts
Meanwhile, scientists across the world are working on the next step, creating an array of real human parts.
In February, doctors at Weill Cornell Medical College and biomedical engineers at Cornell University in New York announced they had used 3-D printing and injectable gels made of cells to build a facsimile of a human ear that looks and acts like a real one.
And in the case of the baby in Michigan, university officials said the splint was created from a CT scan of the patient's trachea and bronchus, integrating a computer model with 3-D printing. The baby, who stopped breathing every day when his collapsed bronchus blocked the flow of air, was off a ventilator three weeks after the surgery, and officials say he hasn't had breathing trouble since.
Wake Forest scientists, like their peers in Louisville, are working on organs. Officials at Wake Forest say their scientists were the first in the world to engineer a lab-grown organ, and they hope to scale up the process by printing organs with a custom printer. Institute scientists there have also designed a bioprinter to print skin cells onto burn wounds.
So far, Williams said he knows of no instance where a tissue or organ created through 3-D printing has been implanted in a human. But he said the race is on.
"I think this will have an incredible effect on trauma patients ... on the armed forces. You can imagine printing a jaw, printing muscle cells, printing the skin," he said. "Ultimately I see it being used to print replacement kidneys, to print livers, and to print hearts — and all from your own cells."
In at least two well written paragraphs, summarize this article. Remember you are graded on spelling, capitalization, punctuation and if you were able to summarize the article in your own words. Highlight and underline important information as you are reading and use the PIE model.