Ah, well. This one was too cool (IMHO) not to share...
Calilasseia wrote:If the title of this thread seems utterly fantastic at first sight, then rest assured that the topic in question caught me by surprise whilst searching for something totally different.
In 2007, the Society for Imaging Science and Technology called for papers for a conference, and one of the papers submitted was this one. Namely:
Application Of Inkjet In Tissue Engineering And Regenerative Medicine: Development Of Inkjet 3D Biofabrication Technology by Makoto Nakamura, Yuichi Nishiyama, Chizuka Henmi, Kumiko Yamaguchi, Shuichi Mochizuki, Koki Takiura, and Hidemoto Nakagawa.
Here's the abstract:
Apparently the researchers are planning to use this research as the foundation upon which they intend to build a method of producing replacement organs for surgical use. The idea is impressively radical - build up the replacement organ cell by cell in three dimensions using an inkjet printer head to position the cells within the structural matrix, literally 'printing' the cells into position! Presumably, stem cells will be used as the starting medium for the process, to produce daughter organ cells of the requisite type, which are then homogenised whilst alive into a 'printable' form, before being used to build the organ.Nakamura [i]et al[/i], 2007 wrote:Abstract: Tissue Engineering and regenerative medicine are hoped as the vanguard medicine of 21st century. Both are the most promising therapeutic method to save patients with organ failure, instead of transplantation. To date, simple and thin tissues have been successfully engineered such as skin and cartilage, however, a number of challenges are needed in engineering other thicker, larger and more complicated tissues and finally available organs. Biological tissues are composed of several types of cells and biomaterials, and have 3D architectures with microscale resolution and macroscale mass. To engineer such tissues, printing technologies are promising, because the printer must print pictures on macroscale papers simultaneously with microscale resolution. Then, we have developed 2D to 3D biofabrication using inkjet and hydrogel. 3D bioprinter has been developed using inkjet by our selves and several structures with hydrogel and living cells were fabricated. In this presentation, we introduce our progress of the research and development using inkjet technology. Digital fabrication including inkjet will provide promising and innovative approaches for sophisticated tissue engineering.
If this scheme works, it'll be quite an achievement to put it mildly, and it says quite a lot about the human capacity to think laterally that someone thought "hey, why don't we build replacement organs using an inkjet printer?"
Next time you use your inkjet printer, you'll have a lot more respect for the technology.
