• HOME
  • NEWS
  • EXPLORE
    • CAREER
      • Companies
      • Jobs
    • EVENTS
    • iGEM
      • News
      • Team
    • PHOTOS
    • VIDEO
    • WIKI
  • BLOG
  • COMMUNITY
    • FACEBOOK
    • INSTAGRAM
    • TWITTER
  • CONTACT US
Sunday, June 4, 2023
BIOENGINEER.ORG
No Result
View All Result
  • Login
  • HOME
  • NEWS
  • EXPLORE
    • CAREER
      • Companies
      • Jobs
        • Lecturer
        • PhD Studentship
        • Postdoc
        • Research Assistant
    • EVENTS
    • iGEM
      • News
      • Team
    • PHOTOS
    • VIDEO
    • WIKI
  • BLOG
  • COMMUNITY
    • FACEBOOK
    • INSTAGRAM
    • TWITTER
  • CONTACT US
  • HOME
  • NEWS
  • EXPLORE
    • CAREER
      • Companies
      • Jobs
        • Lecturer
        • PhD Studentship
        • Postdoc
        • Research Assistant
    • EVENTS
    • iGEM
      • News
      • Team
    • PHOTOS
    • VIDEO
    • WIKI
  • BLOG
  • COMMUNITY
    • FACEBOOK
    • INSTAGRAM
    • TWITTER
  • CONTACT US
No Result
View All Result
Bioengineer.org
No Result
View All Result
Home NEWS Bioengineering

3D-Printed Heart Could Be Beating in 10 Years

Bioengineer by Bioengineer
November 19, 2013
in Bioengineering, Tissue Engineering
Reading Time: 2 mins read
1
Share on FacebookShare on TwitterShare on LinkedinShare on RedditShare on Telegram

An ambitious 3D-printed heart project aims to make a natural organ replacement for patients possible within a decade. But the researcher heading the effort also believes 3D-printing technology must harness the self-organizing power of biology to get the job done.

bioıengineered_heart

The idea of a 3D-printed heart grown from a patient’s own fat stem cells comes from Stuart Williams, executive and scientific director of the Cardiovascular Innovation Institute in Louisville, Ky. His lab has already begun developing the next generation of custom-built 3-D printers aimed at printing out a complete heart with all its parts — heart muscle, blood vessels, heart valves and electrical tissue.

“We can print individual components of the heart, but we’re building next-generation printers to build the heart from the bottom up,” Williams said.

The heart represents one of the most ambitious goals for researchers working to create 3D-printed organs within the field of regenerative medicine. The ability of 3-D printing to build human tissue by laying down living cells layer by layer has already allowed researchers to create small chunks of organs such as livers and kidneys — often by using stem cells extracted from fat or bone marrow as the source material.

Williams and the Cardiovascular Innovation Institute have started out by first using 3-D printing to create individual parts of what they have deemed the “bioficial” heart. That piecemeal approach could eventually allow researchers to print and piece together a fully functional heart within a week.

“I took a step back and looked at my colleagues, and said, ‘Why don’t we build it like a large airplane?'” Williams told LiveScience. “Separate the organ into separate components, figure out the best way to make the components, and then put them together.”

But building full-size organs also requires researchers to print human tissue in a way that includes the intricate networks of tiny blood vessels that keep the organs healthy. Williams envisions 3-D printing as an ideal way to make smaller blood vessels — he and his colleagues have already built large blood vessels for transplant use in surgeries using methods other than 3-D printing.

Still, 3-D printers can only do so much bioengineering when working at the tiniest scales. The best printers may only print structures with the size of millimeters, whereas the smallest blood vessels can have a width of just a few microns, Williams explained, where 1 millimeter is equal to 1,000 microns.

Most Amazing Medical Breakthroughs

That’s why 3-D printing may only get researchers partway toward the goal of creating a complete heart. Instead, researchers will have to rely upon the natural self-organizing tendency of cells to knit together blood vessels and eventually connect everything within a 3D-printed organ — a process that could take place within 24 hours.

“We will be printing things in the order of tens of microns or more like hundreds of microns, and then cells will undergo their biological developmental response in order to self-organize correctly,” Williams said.

Most researchers don’t expect full-size, 3D-printed organs to become reality anytime within the next 10 or even 15 years, but the Cardiovascular Innovation Institute continues to forge ahead with its goal of building a 3D-printed heart within a decade. Williams expects the next generation of “bioprinters” to begin rolling out in December.

Story Source:

The above story is based on materials provided by LiveScience, Jeremy Hsu.

Share13Tweet8Share2ShareShareShare2

Related Posts

blank

Why is the first Turkish bioengineering promotion website, Biyomuhendislik.com, so important?

February 4, 2023
blank

Robo-fish

September 19, 2016

Mice born from ‘tricked’ eggs

September 17, 2016

UCLA researchers use stem cells to grow 3-D lung-in-a-dish

September 16, 2016
Please login to join discussion

POPULAR NEWS

  • plants

    Plants remove cancer causing toxins from air

    40 shares
    Share 16 Tweet 10
  • Element creation in the lab deepens understanding of surface explosions on neutron stars

    36 shares
    Share 14 Tweet 9
  • Deep sea surveys detect over five thousand new species in future mining hotspot

    35 shares
    Share 14 Tweet 9
  • How life and geology worked together to forge Earth’s nutrient rich crust

    35 shares
    Share 14 Tweet 9

About

We bring you the latest biotechnology news from best research centers and universities around the world. Check our website.

Follow us

Recent News

Phase 3 SWOG Cancer Research Network trial, led by a City of Hope researcher, demonstrates one-year progression-free survival in 94% of patients with Stage 3 or 4 classic Hodgkin lymphoma who received a checkpoint inhibitor combined with chemotherapy

The promise of novel FolRα-targeting antibody drug conjugate in recurrent epithelial ovarian cancer

Carbon-based stimuli-responsive nanomaterials: classification and application

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 50 other subscribers
  • Contact Us

Bioengineer.org © Copyright 2023 All Rights Reserved.

No Result
View All Result
  • Homepages
    • Home Page 1
    • Home Page 2
  • News
  • National
  • Business
  • Health
  • Lifestyle
  • Science

Bioengineer.org © Copyright 2023 All Rights Reserved.

Welcome Back!

Login to your account below

Forgotten Password?

Retrieve your password

Please enter your username or email address to reset your password.

Log In