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The future is here, it's alive and thrilling. Scientists at Tel Aviv University printed the world's first 3D heart with blood vessels, using a personalized collagen "ink", a protein that supports cell structures and other biological molecules.
Lead scientists Dr. Tal Dvir, Dr. Assaf Shapira of TAU's Faculty of Life Sciences, and Nadav Noor, his doctoral student in advanced science, announced Monday this extraordinary breakthrough.
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That's right, the heart is about the size of a rabbit and it does not work yet. Dvir, however, emphasized that "the impression" of a human-sized heart essentially involves the same technology.
"We need to further develop the printed heart," he said. "The cells must form a pumping capacity; they can currently contract, but we need them to work together. Our hope is that we will succeed and prove the effectiveness and utility of our method. "
In other words, the next step is to grow the heart of a rodent's size in the laboratory, grow it and ripen it, and teach the artificial-but biological-organ of to behave like a heart. The next step will be to transplant 3D printed hearts to animals to test their functionality.
It will probably be years before this technology can create organs for an effective transplant, if at all. However, the success of Tel Aviv scientists has so far been a milestone in graft science: tissues were printed prior to the use of three-dimensional printing technology, but they did not have the vasculature – the blood vessels – essential to usability.
Tissue printing has already been done, but there are only simple tissues without blood vessels, says the university. "This is the first time anyone has designed and successfully printed a complete heart with cells, blood vessels, ventricles and chambers," said Dvir.
Until now, scientists have succeeded in printing cartilage tissue and aortic valves, for example, but the challenge was to create complete tissue with vascularization: blood vessels, including capillaries, without which the organs could not survive, let alone work.
Scientists in Tel Aviv started with adipose tissue extracted from humans and separated cellular and non-cellular components. They then reprogrammed the cells to transform them into undifferentiated stem cells, which could then be transformed into cardiac cells or endothelial cells.
The non-cellular materials, including the profuse proteins, were turned into a "custom hydrogel" that served as "printing ink," Dvir explained.
Although the technology is still in its infancy, printed organs are already being used for training purposes in medical schools and allow doctors to plan complicated surgical procedures.
Dvir hopes that technology will become the norm in a decade, printing organs and tissues for people using their own tissue as a base.
The printing of organs involves three basic steps. The first, the pre-printing phase, involves scanning the organ, for example at the MRI. The second step is to print the organ layer by layer, and the third step is to "ripen" the printed organ in an appropriate environment.
The heart has been considered particularly difficult to manufacture because of its complexity and the pressures it faces.
Dvir explains that the use of the patient's own molecules greatly reduces the likelihood of rejection of an organ. His greatest hope is that the printing of organs makes the organ donation obsolete.
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