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| Biologically Printed Ear |
Scientists have been working on
bioprinting for a few years now and can even actually print small body parts. Medical
technology has seen many changes over the 1,000’s of years humans have studied
medicine, but I believe that printing three-dimensional parts of the body,
including organs that can function properly in a human body, will have a great
impact in medical technology.
The very first bioprinter was not
big and fancy, it just another everyday printer. Then after scientists modified
the printer and tried filling the ink cartridges with collagen (the main protein in animal connective tissues), they were
able to start making small models of parts of the human anatomy. As they made
faster bioprinters researchers were able to process other types of cells like
stem cells, muscle cells, and vascular cells. A bioprinter creates the
programed body part with immense precision, making every detail exactly the
same as the real one. In theory, the replicated part of the body will work as
if you were born with it. 3-D printers have also been used to create bone
grafts, dental crowns, hearing aids, and prosthetic limbs. Researches have met
complexities along the way in making the hair-like blood vessels linking the
larger blood vessels to other cells. They have also been challenged with
creating transplantable organs that function accurately.
Non-biological printing does not
have the same complexities that 3-D bioprinting runs into. Researchers
discovered the choice of materials such as cell type, growth and
differentiation factors, and technical challenges are related to the
sensitivities of living cells and the construction of tissues. So while
researchers have created other “inks” by printing cartilage, which allows them
to design entire ears that perfectly match a patient’s outer ear, it is much
harder to print a replacement for a damaged inner ear.
Discovering these complexities
requires the knowledge of engineering, biomaterial sciences, cell biology,
physics and medicine. In order to create functional components they have made
several approaches to 3D
bioprinting, including biomimicry, autonomous self-assembly and mini-tissue
building blocks. Scholars will slowly make more discoveries and in the future
they will hopefully construct whole limbs and organs that will function
properly with the rest of a body.
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