Gizmodo’s 3D Printing Week, a collaborative project with GE that comes to a close this evening, would only be partially complete without a look at the use of animals as living 3D printers. They are sentient printheads, we might say: biological sources of material, whether it’s silk and honey or plastic and even, as we’ll see below, concrete.
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Nature has a nice dive into the scientific quest to grow complex organs like a human heart. No, it hasn’t been done yet—but it’s surprisingly within reach.
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Water and fat — those are the two primary building blocks Oxford University researchers have used to 3D print the droplet you see above. Sounds unremarkable until you consider its intended application as a human tissue replacement. By stringing together thousands of these so-called droplets (which measure about 50 microns across) using a custom-built 3D printer, the Oxford team believes it has engineered a “new type of material” that could eventually be used to ferry drugs throughout our internal systems to a specific target site, fill-in for damaged tissues or even mimic neural pathways via specially printed protein pores. The potential applications for medical science are impressive enough, but consider this additional benefit: since the droplets contain no genetic material, scientists can completely sidestep all the ethical red tape surrounding the alternative stem cell approach to artificial tissue. At present, the team’s been able to string about 35,000 of the droplets together, but there’s no real cap as to how large or even what type of networks can be made. If the money and equipment are willing, this Oxford team can make scifi dreams come true.
Via: National Geographic
Source: Oxford University
The increasingly ambiguous divide between man and machine just got blurred that much more with Stanford’s recent announcement: scientists have successfully created the first truly biological transistor made entirely out of genetic material. More »
There’s a whole sea of jellyfish out there ready to sting indiscriminately. So, why do we keep trying to make them? Scientists from Harvard and Caltech have a pretty good reason for creating fake jellies — they hope to mend broken hearts by adapting their ‘pumping’ style of movement. Much like our own vital organ, the creatures are a mass of muscle adept at shifting fluid, meaning the research has several medical applications, such as bioengineered pacemakers for busted tickers. In creating the Medusoids, the team used a silicon scaffold coated in functional rat cardiac tissue, copying the muscle layout of a real jellyfish as best they could. When immersed in salt water and treated to bursts of current, the cells contract and cause the silicon sheet to move in a way eerily similar to the real thing. Next step for the team? An autonomous version that can move and potentially feed without their influence, of course. And, after seeing the little swimmers in action, we’ve certainly got palpitations. See what we mean after the break.
Continue reading Fake jellyfish made from rat cells have a place in our hearts (video)
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Fake jellyfish made from rat cells have a place in our hearts (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 23 Jul 2012 14:59:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Scientists have managed to build an artificial jelly fish entirely from rat cells, which can pulse and swim when exposed to an electric field, just like its living counterpart. More »
Printing a chocolate heart is easy enough, but how about an actual organ? There are folks working on it, but it turns out those veins of yours aren’t exactly a breeze to replicate. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and MIT may have found a semi-sweet solution — dissolving a sugar lattice in a batch of living Jell-O. The research team uses a RepRap 3D printer and a custom extruder head to print a filament network composed of sucrose, glucose and dextran which is later encased in a bio-gel containing living cells. Once the confectionery paths are dissolved, they leave a network of artery-like channels in their void. Tissue living in the gel can then receive oxygen and nutrients through the hollow pipes.
The research has been promising so far, and has increased the number of functional liver cells the team has been able to maintain in artificial tissues. These results suggest the technique could have future research possibilities in developing lab-grown organs. MIT Professor Sangeeta Bhatia, who helped conduct the effort, hopes to push the group’s work further. “More work will be needed to learn how to directly connect these types of vascular networks to natural blood vessels while at the same time investigating fundamental interactions between the liver cells and the patterned vasculature. It’s an exciting future ahead.” Scientists at other labs could also get their mitts on the sweet templates since they’re stable enough to endure shipping. Head past the break for a video of the innard infrastructure.
Researchers use 3D printer, sugar, to create a fake artery network for lab-grown tissue originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 03 Jul 2012 04:07:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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