Printing 3D Kidneys and Hearts - Coming Soon !!!!

Soon you’ll be able to print 3D kidneys and hearts. Wait! There is more. Not just these, you’ll be able to print any deployable human organ that you want!

Scientists are making big strides towards this direction at Carnegie Mellon University. They purchased a consumer-level 3D printer that anyone can buy online for 1,000 $ and hacked it to print soft materials.

Adam Feinberg, an associate professor of Materials Science and Engineering and Biomedical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University says that they’ve been able to take MRI images of coronary arteries and 3-D images of embryonic hearts and 3-D bioprint them with unprecedented resolution.

Printing soft materials is a huge challenge in itself as materials usually collapse under their own weight when they’re printed. A 3D printer works by depositing material onto a surface layer by layer until the object acquires its shape.

Feinberg and collaborators hacked the inexpensive printer to print soft, biological material such as collagen, which is the connective tissue that keeps skin firm, and fibrin, the fibrous protein involved in blood clotting. But in place of layering the software materials on a flat surface, they printed the materials in a supportive gel. They warmed up the gel later so that it’d melt away, leaving the undamaged structure.

Feinberg and team have named this sophisticated 3-D printing technique FRESH, an acronym that stands for Freeform Reversible Embedding of Suspended Hydrogels. They are soon going to release their 3D printer designs under an open source license to help promote the growth in this fascinating area. The research group wants to find a way to incorporate real heart cells into 3D-printed tissue structures so that they can form contracting muscle.