Computer: Print me a Kidney (Tissue Engineer)

Posted on Tuesday, March 08, 2011 by Unknown

Long Beach, California - A surgeon specialising in regenerative medicine on Thursday “printed” a real kidney using a machine that eliminates the need for donors when it comes to organ transplants.

“It’s like baking a cake,” Atala said. Anthony Atala of the Wake Forest Institute of Regenerative Medicine said as he cooked up a fresh kidney on stage at a TED Conference in the California city of Long Beach.

A few years ago, Atala figured out how to produce human tissue with a desktop inkjet printer, using cells as the printer ink. In a TED talk last year, he described printing heart valves and other tissues. This week at TED, he brought one of his patients on stage. When he was 10, Luke Massella was among the first people to receive a re-engineered organ — he was born with spina bifida and received a new bladder grown from his own tissue. Now he’s a healthy college student.

The organ-printing process employs scanners that collect a 3-D image of the organ that needs to be replaced. A small tissue sample seeds the printer, which replicates the tissue layer by layer to build a new organ, all in about six or seven hours. It would use the patient’s own tissue, so it avoids any organ rejection issues.

During Atala's talk, a specially designed printer was about three hours into printing a kidney model built out of biocompatible materials. He also brought a completed model to show to the audience.
Initial reports suggested Atala had printed a working kidney, but it was actually a kidney-shaped mold with no internal structures or vasculature, according to Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center, where Atala is a regenerative medicine specialist.

He said someday, scanners and printers could conceivably be used to treat wounds. A flatbed scanner could scan a patient’s wound, while a printer adds the right types of tissues to fill it back in. “You can print right on the patient,” Atala said, according to a report on the talk at Fast Company.

Atala also described using a patient's failed organ as a scaffold for a new version, filling it with new tissue. This could help address the challenge of building blood vessels, which remains one of the greatest challenges in tissue engineering.

About 90 percent of people waiting for transplants are in need of kidneys, and the need far outweighs the supply of donated organs, according to Atala.

“There is a major health crisis today in terms of the shortage of organs,” Atala said. “Medicine has done a much better job of making us live longer, and as we age our organs don't last.”

Source:Independent Online