Will 'Bioprinting' Body Parts Lead To Crazy Cosmetic Requests?
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A 20-year-old young woman underwent the first ear transplant, which is very exciting. Her own cells were used in a printer — kind of a dot printer, if you will — and layer by layer, they built up a living artificial ear that could accept circulation from her own body. She had been born with a condition where her ears didn't develop. It was a wonderful cosmetic breakthrough, the first that I'm aware of using bioprinted organs to supplement or repair a body part. More of this is on the way. I think we're going to see bioprinting start to move into the production of skin, or perhaps blood vessels. If you can think of things in the body that are simple fluids, not too complicated, or sheets of tissue, that's exactly where bioprinting is.
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@vinit It's not yet quite to the point where we could see somebody print out a functioning heart. That's too complicated in terms of getting everything right so that it would work — although someday, but not soon. Same thing with a functional liver. Think about blood components, skin, or maybe the lining of the intestine. There are areas where bioprinting, I think, holds much in store for the future of repair of damaged organs or birth defects. That's very exciting. I don't have much ethical objection about those uses. They sound wonderful. Things that we didn't know how to repair or couldn't do very well cosmetically, now we're seeing the bioprinter suddenly jump in and start to be used to manufacture body parts.