Bio-Printing

What is Bio-Printing?

Bio-Printer is used to print living cells and bodily structure.

The goal of bio-printing is to create replacement body parts from living cells. It is still in the development because the process of bio-printing takes several hours to print a completely organic object.

The whole concept of bio-printing can revolutionize in the medical field. The use of Bio-printing will save millions of lives by printing a replacement organ for patients that require organ transplant instead of patients waiting for organ donors which can take years to find a suitable match

How does it work?

The way bio-printers work is by producing cells from a bio-print head that moves in a repetitive sequence to place the following cells exactly where it is in order to be able to print a functional organ or 3D object. The process of bio-printing takes several hours to print a completely functional organ.

The Advantages of Bio-printing:

Increase effectiveness:

Bio-printing improves test accuracies and drug safety for the drug company. In addition, it reduces the cost of drug development

Increase efficiency:
Business process can be accomplished either by quickly using resources efficiently or by using fewer resources and facilities. Bio-printing prints new organ from a person. Hence, a person with organ failure will not have to wait for years for a compatible organ to be found (shorter time).Bio-printing also creates new organs from raw biological material instead of using real organs from a donor (few resources).

Automated and Increase in productivity:

Bio-printing creates new tissue from human cells through printing technology. It also  increases the productivity of new organs through a computer program.

 The Future Use of Bio-Printing:

3D bio-printer has been developed so that one day it could be used to “print “organs in order to have organ replacement surgery on demand. Furthermore, in a commercial aspect, it would be  3D bio-printer that manufactures human organs.                                                                                         

 In Situ bio-printing:

face printer

Instead of printing human organs or tissues in the lab, the development of technique could print directly onto or into the body in situ. For example: spraying skin cell layers heals wound faster. Furthermore, robot surgical with bio-print function can enter into the body and repair any damaged cells.

  

Cosmetic Applications: 

cosmetic application

The development of creating face printer can revolutionize the cosmetic surgery. It works by people scanning their face or other people face. Face printer will replace new cells in each specification according to people desires.

Products, vendors or companies
            

Organovo is a company that specialises in regenerative medicine, and Invetech, an engineering and automation firm, have worked together to design a NovoGen MMX bio-printer. The function of NovoGen MMX bio-printer takes human cells and transforms them into “3D tissue”.

Makoto Nakamura, a Japanese scientist, realized the size of human cells and ink droplets in a inkjet printer were the same size. The innovation of Bio-Printing made him design bio-tubing which are similar to blood vessels.

In University of Columbia, the Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine Lab are working on the innovation of dental implants from the usage of bio-printer.

Barriers to adoption:

Bio- printing cannot print out a whole human organ. Only small layers (2 inches) are created.

In order to create any tissue, stem cell has to be formed correctly and precisely. Bio-printer is still an ongoing development  to achieve precise cell – level:

• The need to enhance droplet formation speed

• The need to enhance the ability to control the formation of droplet and its size.

Links:

• http://www.innovateus.net/health/what-bioprinting
• http://www.investmentu.com/2012/March/organovo-3d-bioprinting-pharmaceuticals.html
• http://phantomself.org/human-replication-technology-update-2010-bioprinting/
• http://graphics.tech.uh.edu/student_work/specialty_printing/Specialty_Printing/Future_Bioprinting.html
• http://www.experts123.com/q/what-is-bioprinting.html
• http://www.explainingthefuture.com/bioprinting.html