Researchers from Rice University able to 3D print living tissues

HOUSTON (AP) – More than 100,000 people in the United States are stuck on a waiting list for an organ transplant, hoping to find the perfect match with their blood type, their size and location of the hospital.

But many – 20 a day actually – will die before they receive the body they need.

The Houston Chronicle reports therefore imagine if scientists could simply print one for them using a method similar to 3D printing.

Jordan Miller, a bioengineer at Rice University, has been working toward this goal for five years. It's more complicated than it sounds: the 3D printing originally was created for plastics, incompatible with the human body.

But Miller and his team have now found a way to 3D print live tissue using human cells and a water-based solution. This discovery was published Thursday in the journal Science.

"Tissue engineering has been struggling with this problem for a generation," said Kelly Stevens, a bioengineer from the University of Washington, who also led the project. "With this work, we can now ask ourselves better:" If we can print tissues that now look and breathe more than the healthy tissues of our body, will they also behave more functionally like these tissues? ""

In January, more than 113,000 men, women and children found themselves waiting for an organ, according to the US Government's Information on Organ Donation and Transplantation website.

And every 10 minutes, a person is added to the waiting list, says the website.

Despite the high number of people looking for an organ, only 36,528 transplants were performed in 2018, the site continues.

"Every year, the number of people on the waiting list continues to be much larger than the number of donors and the number of transplants, which are slowly increasing," the site says.

The conclusions of Miller and Kelly are not only on paper. The team was able to develop a model showing that the printing process works.

This model is smaller than a penny, but it contains tiny vascular-like structures traversing a lung-breathing bag. The researchers were able to mimic the breathing pattern found in the human lung with the aid of precision air pumps.

"Tests of the structure mimicking the lungs showed that the tissues were robust enough to prevent bursting during blood circulation and pulsatile" breathing ", rhythmic air entry and exit simulating the pressures and the frequencies of human respiration, "according to a rice university. newsletter. "Tests have shown that red blood cells can absorb oxygen when they circulate in a network of blood vessels surrounding the" air bag ".

Their technology is the first to take up this challenge.

"There has been a lot of interest in bio-printing over the past decade," the statement said. "A functional organ reserve could one day be used to treat millions of patients around the world."

Miller admits that it will take a long time before this is possible. But he predicts that this type of 3D printing will be widely used in medicine over the next 20 years.

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