The bio-body impression of promise for regenerative medicine

Written by Sandeep Nehra

The bio-organic textile printing custom advance and represents a promising potential for regenerative medicine, especially for treating burns or replace cartilage, according to researchers.

“One of the things we made in our laboratory is to print – in three dimensions – the meniscus of a knee which has exactly the shape of the original and the same biological properties,” said Hod Lipson of Cornell University (New York, north-east) at the annual conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) meeting this weekend in Washington.

Several research groups in the United States and Europe working on different types of cells, “he told reporters, noting that the printing technology of three dimensional objects date thirty years, but its applications medical potential are much more recent.

The researcher gave a demonstration for journalists in reproducing in about twenty minutes, using the “photo-copier” particular copy, synthetic resin, in one ear.

The objective is first to work on simple as a cartilage tissue that has little blood vessels to gradually replicate more complex organic structures, said the researcher.

“It will take much longer before we can use these copies of organs for relocating directly in a human or an animal,” admitted the scientist but “one can imagine the potential of this approach.

Thus, “it would take cells from a donor, make them multiply in a culture before mixing them to a kind of ink to recreate an implant alive from an original,” he said.

This copy would be to avoid the phenomenon of rejection of transplanted organs and to have an implant alive, instead of a synthetic prosthesis.

Dr. James Yoo, professor at the Institute for Regenerative Medicine at the University of North Carolina (southeast) it works specifically on printing the skin to speed healing of burns, including U.S. soldiers wounded in Afghanistan, within the framework of a program of the Pentagon.

‘Up to 30% of all injuries and fatalities in the war affects the skin, the use of bio-printing meets the needs of these burnt “, he said during the same presentation.

“We have built machines that can be bio-printers brought about the wounded soldiers to deposit layers of skin cells printed in the burn,” said the doctor, whose team has conducted successful experiments on mice.

“What is unique about this machine is a scanner that reproduces images in three dimensions of breadth and depth of the wound to determine the precise number of cell layers to be deposited,” said he said.

“If this technology development goes well, we can use it to treat wounded soldiers but also civilians in the coming years,” predicts Dr. Yoo.

For Vladimir Mironov, a professor of regenerative medicine at the University of South Carolina and author of another presentation at the AAAS, the technology of bio-printing of living tissue within 20 years could “afford to print structures complex cell can be directly implanted into the human body by robots, and without the intervention of a surgeon.

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