Draw a hear and print it

The dream of creating organs to be transplanted is near. Many of you might remember the movie "Bicentennial man" and how he created organs and saved many lives. This might be possible now, thanks to the 3D printers and the huge progress they bring.

I know it might sound like a sci-fi movie but printing three dimensional organs such as a hearts, livers and kidneys is something that a lot of researchers all over the world had been working on for a long time.

One of this teams has been able to use the 3D printers technology to actually print human tissue. This team from San Diego, California is directed by Keith Murphy and they work at Organovo. Their final objective is to be able to print complete organs, to be transplanted.

In simple words, the printer has two heads. On one side they put the cells and on the other side they put the gel. The work is very precise and this two components together to create a three dimensional tissue.

The biological 'inc' is made of stem cells or bone marrow. They are kept on test tubes and cultivated there.

They create the form they want to give to the tissue, on the computer but then it is nature itself that does the work. Cells organize themselves to form the tissue.

The advantages of this advancement is that the organisms of the patients would never reject the new tissue because it would come from them.

In the future they expect to be able to create new organs that patients cannot reject and to save millions of lives, because the wait for a new organ would not exist.

For further information you can watch this video: Video (It is in spanish)