Printing organs on demand?

This is some very interesting work with technology...designing organs to print on demand....click on the picture below for additional study information...BD

Every year, pharmaceutical companies invest many millions of dollars to test drugs that will never reach market while the number of patients waiting for organ transplants continues to increase. Would it be possible to create human tissues to help to solve both problems? A research team from the University of Missouri in Columbia (MU) thinks so. According to Nature, the researchers have created functional blood vessels and cardiac tissue, using a ‘printer’ that dispenses cells instead of ink. This has been done before with the help of ’scaffolds.’ But this team didn’t use them. Instead, it was able to print various structures from scratch. This might be a brilliant and promising step towards printing organs on demand. But read more…

Here is a quote from Forgacs about the future. “‘We will never be able to print a liver with all of its many details,’ says Forgacs. ‘If you initiate the process, nature will do it for you.’”The printer has three heads, each of which is controlled by an attached computer, that can lay down spheroids of cells much as a desk printer would lay down ink. Two of the heads print out tissue cells (mixtures including, for example, cardiac and endothelial cells), while the third prints a ‘gap-filler’ (such as collagen) that fills a space temporarily until the other cells have fused. So to make a blood vessel, for example, lines of cells are laid down with lines of collagen in the middle, which will later be extracted to make way for blood.”