Printing Blood Vessels With Sugar

We can grow the tissue, but how do we feed it?

Printing kidneys on an inkjet printer filled with human cells? Yeah, we can do that. Old hat. Using Lego robots to grow human bones in the lab? Pssh. Easy.

One of the roadblocks in creating human tissue on demand is ensuring that it will stay alive inside the recipient’s body. And to do that it needs blood vessels. If you were to drop a hunk of cells in your body, assuming your immune system didn’t eat it up, you’d be hard pressed to get good bloodflow to the middle. Tumors also have this problem, incidentally.

Those previous technologies aren’t easy by any means, as much as I like to joke, but as they grow more routine we need a way to get blood vessels into these lab-grown tissues. Why not print your organ on a scaffold of pre-grown blood vessels?

That’s what this Penn group has in mind. By creating a scaffold of sugar polymers using a 3-D printer, and then pouring a cell solution over the top, they can create precise plumbing systems on demand. The cells form into vessels, and the polymers dissolve away. If these scaffolds are sent to other “tissue factories”, we could grow that kidney with the blood vessels already installed!

Science, you’re amazing.

(↬ Boing Boing)

Source: Boing Boing

175 Notes/ Hide

  1. zuri-bella reblogged this from jtotheizzoe
  2. yellowbeads reblogged this from jtotheizzoe
  3. sterlingclearblackenedice reblogged this from futurecurious
  4. gurini reblogged this from jtotheizzoe
  5. gooseandjewels reblogged this from jtotheizzoe and added:
    Yes you are. C:
  6. gbrownco reblogged this from jtotheizzoe
  7. lets-explore-space reblogged this from jtotheizzoe
  8. legitlisette reblogged this from jtotheizzoe
  9. jcacciolagallery reblogged this from jtotheizzoe
  10. undeadkitty13 reblogged this from jtotheizzoe
  11. minddaydream reblogged this from jtotheizzoe
  12. duffmansean reblogged this from sixgunsound
  13. genehetz3 reblogged this from jtotheizzoe
  14. inoseall reblogged this from jtotheizzoe
  15. oneofthepaths reblogged this from jtotheizzoe
  16. nickerdoodle7 reblogged this from jtotheizzoe
  17. sixgunsound reblogged this from jtotheizzoe
  18. picaq reblogged this from jtotheizzoe
  19. saraahlynne reblogged this from jtotheizzoe
  20. microloca reblogged this from jtotheizzoe
  21. futurecurious reblogged this from jtotheizzoe
  22. nandoodles reblogged this from remango
  23. namosays reblogged this from jtotheizzoe
  24. seaunicorns reblogged this from jtotheizzoe
  25. spacey-stacy reblogged this from montidrew

Recent comments

Blog comments powered by Disqus