Use Of Bio Printers As A Replacement For Current Organ Donation Treatments

Tissue engineering is an emerging interdisciplinary field that uses principles from engineering, biology and chemistry in an effort towards tissue regeneration. The main draw of tissue engineering is the regeneration of a patient’s own tissues and organs free from low biofunctionality and poor biocompatibility and serious immune rejection. As medical care continues to improve and life expectancy continues to grow, organ shortages become more problematic.(Manufacturing living things) According to organdonor.gov, a patient is added to the waiting list every 10 minutes and an average of 18 people die everyday waiting for an organ donation. The “nirvana” of tissue engineering is to replace the need for organ donation altogether. This could be achieved using scaffolding from

Doctors and engineers have been working on another way to get organs a faster and more efficient way. Using 3D printers can help with their problem. They have worked on using a 3D printer to make organs that are a perfect match for patients. This can be very useful it can get an organ ready in a short amount of time helping the patient recovery faster as well. Organ transplants are hard to come by. One you have to be put in a waiting list, and people are usually on that list for a long while, just waiting for a perfect match to come. But sometimes it takes to long and some people die while still on the waiting list. But when an organ finally does come they feel bad because someone had to die in order for them to use it. So Dr Ali Khademhosseini is trying to use 3D printing to help solve this problem. His theory is he can make organs from a 3D printer, which can make the waiting list decrease faster and have people not have to die in order for a perfect match. 3D printers have been used to make Human cells, tissue, and blood vessels. But making something like a heart is much more difficult. Because you have to make the beating and pumps. (Mesley). There have been problems in the past that have just know started to show in some people. "Viruses aren't the only worry, and here too the past may serve as a guide. In 1956 injections of human growth hormone became a standard therapy for children failing to develop properly. The hormone was extracted from

In the past, the only way to replace diminished cells, tissues, and organs was from organ transplantation. An organ donor was needed, and the tissues would be surgically removed from the donated body and placed into the recipient. Due to the current research being conducted, it is believed that tissue engineering and organ printing can contribute to the process of improving and saving lives.

My exploration of this topic led me to an article on HuffingtonPost.com. The article is “How 3D Printing Could End The Deadly Shortage of Donor Organs” by Macrina Cooper-White. In said article,

In the future, the technology will be widely accepted since it can be used to create complete organ, to test newly developed drugs on manufactured cells instead of animals and human cell, to imprint cells directly onto a human body, thus reducing the wait time for organ transplantation, and save time and cost associated with drug research. An absolutely favorable position of customized organs is designing organs utilizing a patient 's own particular cells. With this methodology, there would be no issues with dismissal, and patients wouldn 't need to take the powerful anti-rejection medications that are presently required (Cooper-White, 2015). According to the Organovo company, the formation of a suitable liver is a crunch second for the bio-printing and drug industry since it demonstrates 3D printed tissue can be preserved successfully for a sufficient time to test the impacts of medications on it or insert it in a human body where it can further mature (Mearian,2013).

Aside from these state level approaches, 3D printing offers a promise for increasing available organs. This promise was validated in 2016, when a toddler from Northern Ireland became the “first to have a life-saving adult kidney transplant, using 3D printing.” While much work still needs to be done, printed organs, in addition to other proposed solutions, are alternatives to creating human-pig chimeras for organ transplantation.

Three dimensional (3D) printing, also known as additive manufacturing, is taking the world by storm and is said to be “the next big thing”, the next revolution, or as big as the Internet. President Barack Obama stated in his 2013 State of the Union address that 3D printing has the potential to revolutionize the way we make almost anything (Gross, 2013). However, will 3D printing have a positive effect on the future of our society looking at the effects on the manufacturing businesses, healthcare, and consumer home printing? To answer this question we will explore the current technology and how it is currently being used in manufacturing businesses, healthcare, and consumer home printing and, prospects for future use in these areas. We will explore the limitations and advantages of the 3D printing technology. Referencing trade journals, textbooks, popular opinion, and expert opinions in the fields of business, management, engineering, and computer technology to evaluate the societal effects of 3D printing for our future.

According to Spiewak, the advantages of bio-printing are the ability to integrate vascularization, ability to generate tissue, controlled delivery of growth genes, precise patterning of cells, ability to co-culture multiple cell types locally, enables fabrication of anatomically correct shapes, along with allowing fabrication of porous structures (18). On the flip side, some ethical concerns that many individuals may have on research are the cost, production control, complications, and the organs made with nonhuman cells (Griggs 20). Individuals may believe that bio-printing may be expensive and only will qualify for the wealthy. However, that can’t be determined since the medical research of bio-printing organs is still in the beginning stage and is years of a way of production of a viable organ for transplantation. Sifferlin notes Dr. Macchiarini research that “he plans to conduct a clinical trial to properly assess the risks and benefits of the procedure, and document how bodies react to the transplanted devices. Hopefully those trials will show that it's possible to regenerate not just organs but hope as well.” (13.) Every major surgery of course comes with a risk; however, every individual has the right to take on the risk if they please. Most individual will not be concerned with the ethical concerns, since saving human life surely outweighs every

Bioprinting is very advanced and hard to do correctly. Bioprinters are open to the public, meaning that anyone could obtain one. If anyone can obtain the power to use a bioprinter because there are no requirements it means that someone could wrongly create a prosthetic limb or other major parts. If they are wrongly created and given away then, someone can be severely harmed. “3-D printing using computer-created digital models to create real-world objects, has produced everything from toys to jewelry to food” (Griggs). This means that people use computer based programs to create their projects. After they create their project it gets sent to the bioprinter and then it uses to online program to print the project. Also, “Eyeballs, skin, ear replacements, and organs such as livers are in the works in a new field called bioprinting” (3D Printing: The Future is Here!). This shows that people have begun to do more advanced things with bioprinter and anyone is allowed to use a bioprinter. People without proper education or knowledge trying to successfully do this will ruin the whole project. Using bioprinters correctly is hard and there is a certain amount of thought that needs to be put into to it. As of right now there are no laws or regulations limiting the people who can and cannot use the printers meaning if someone does not know what they are doing they can still try and do it incorrectly without

As mentioned earlier, 3D printing can be more than just fun and games. 3D printing can be used to make organs and living tissues as well. This is obviously a complex process, but it can be done. This would allow more people to be able to receive transplants. This idea of printing organs and tissues has been discussed for quite a while now.

What exactly does the future of bioprinting have in store for this world? One could never be too sure. Despite the fact that artificial organs seem alien to a profuse amount of people, its current state in development justifies that bioprinted organs have the potentiality to do great things to those in

second that goes by, researchers are creating effective ways that can save more American lives. In the world of medicine today, there are many issues in health care we cannot solve. The lack of organs and tissues in America results in patients either dying or being put on waiting lists. There are no guarantees that the organ transplant will get to a person in time. Waiting for a perfect donor can take weeks and sometimes years for some patients. The lack of necessary organs is what has caused this organ transplantation crisis in America. This is what has driven many researchers to develop a new solution called three dimensional bio printing and tissue engineering.

Anthony Atla, a researcher at Wake Forest University, caused a sensation when he appeared in a TED talk in 2011 and gave what many people mistook for a demonstration of how to print a living human kidney. Naturally, since almost 90 percent of the patients on the organ donation list are waiting for replacement kidneys, people got very excited. After the ensuing confusion was sorted out, it turned out that 3D printing live kidneys was still in the early stages of research. The kidney printing was actually a lab experiment involving the 3D printing of kidney-like tissue that was capable of filtering blood and diluting tissue.

In 1986 Charles Hull invented the 3D printer (Lewis). Hull’s 3D printer has come a long way since then, and in all those years 3D printing has finally shifted its way into the public eye. This bout of fame and recognition for printers though is both a blessing as well as a curse. 3D printers are finally being given the attention and appreciation they deserve; even President Obama saw their potential when he gave a $30 million dollar grant to the National Additive Manufacturing Innovation Institute in Ohio (Lewis). Unfortunately, the 3D printer’s new found popularity comes with a price. Like any budding young star the 3D printer is under constant scrutiny and has lost some of the freedom it once had, freedoms like exemption from

3D printing is a technology that was invented in the early 1980s by a man named Charles Hull (Ventola, 2014). Since its creation, 3D printing has branched into many different aspects of the world and is being utilized in fields like the automotive industry, medicine and is even being used for everyday purposes. Later on, Charles Hull founded a company called 3D Systems which developed the first ever 3D printer. In 1988, Hull and his company 3D Systems, put forth the first commercially available 3D printer. From this point on, 3D printing would be advanced and evolved to the point where it would have the opportunity to create a revolutionary impact on the world we