How long before we have 3D printed organs used in medicine like 3D printed liver or 3D printed kidney or heart.
Is this some thing that is 10 years away or some thing more like 20 years away?
What problems have they had with 3D printed organs that this may take 10 to 15 years before we have this or more?
I read about using pigs organs and transplanting those organs to humans seem easier than 3D printed organs. But even with that they had setbacks.
Other thing is using stem cells and transplanting those stem cells or putting those stem cells on bad organ.
But for what ever reason there is very little talk about this and 3D printed organs seem easier.
It depends on what organ you’re talking about, and also what you mean by 3D printing. Livers, for instance, are easy. If you have some liver cells, and encourage them to reproduce into more liver cells, and end up with a big clump of liver cells all growing together, well, that’s a liver. Most organs, though, need structure. And while 3D printing can help with some aspects of that structure, it can’t do everything. As I understand it, the technique that’s mostly being studied is to print a framework out of some material that’ll gradually degrade in the body, and use that framework to get cells into the right rough shape, but in many organs there are details you can’t get that way: The structures are too fine to be printed, or they depend on different sorts of cells being in different places, or they depend on the cells being not just in the right places but also the right orientation, and so on.
By combining 3D printing with the methods biology naturally uses to create these structures, you might be able to make a usable organ. Maybe. Or maybe we can’t get the biological processes to work outside of an embryo at all, or maybe in the process of getting those biological processes to work, it turns out that the 3D printing part is completely unnecessary and we can do it all biologically.
The notion that we can “3D print” a working mammalian organ has so many issues that it is difficult to know where to start. For one, organs are made of different tissues comprised of many types of cells, and individual cells are not something that can just be ‘printed’ from a filament or reservoir; they require external inputs (nutrients, oxygen, et cetera) to subsist, and a conditioned environment to even be functional. Another is that organs are made from many types of cells that differentiate as the organ develops, and that process of development is crucial to getting a functional organ instead of a mess of non-working protoplasm. Organs themselves require a blood supply and conditioning to survive more than a few hours outside of the body before becoming non-functional, so unless you could ‘print’ an organ within some kind of supportive environment, you’d just have a mass of inanimate dead tissue in an organ-like structure.
We can grow a 3D substrate upon which less complex tissues can be grow in an agar or in vivo within a living organism. This is done today with dermis (the innter ‘living’ layer of skin) and vascular tissues (blood vessels), and there is active research in building replacement bone and connective tissue for surgical reconstruction. More complex organs involved in circulatory, digestive, or nervous system functions, however, are too complex and have support requirements that essentially mandate being grown inside of a living mammal. To that end, genetic modification of mammals (typically pigs or cows) to produce human-compatible functioning organs is in progress, and while it has not yet achieved a level of compatibility for long term organ replacement, it is only a matter of development (particularly with immunological compatibility) before this is routinely available.
No, the problem is that organs are not just machines constructed out of organic Lego blocks; they are integrated systems of living tissues made of a diverse array of cells that are in different states of development, all of which need to be sustained with nutrients and oxygen. You can’t just construct an tissues out of non-living matter, or squeeze disconnected ‘live’ cells into an organ-shaped bolus and expect them to coalesce into a functional organ. At best, you could deposit pluripotent stem cells onto a consumable substrate in an oxygenated nutrient bath and ‘grow’ the organ into a mature, transplantable state.
I hear organs are very complex it like a mini city but using that analogy of mini city if a 3D printer prints the pavement but no streets, no office buildings, no government buildings but only prints the homes and pavement than the printer is very crude.
So does this mean we need more advance printers to print the other stuff as not every thing is being printed and than you say connecting is problem do we need nanotechnology to help in that area?
Is it like a mini city but only 10% of the mini city is printed and most of it is not connected?
I don’t know much about nanotechnology but popular science is going crazy with it as this is emerging technology. But I still thing it be very long time before we have small tiny robots in the human body.
As most off the research is still very crude. So I don’t know how nanotechnology can help in this area.