X-Message-Number: 24537
From: "Mark Plus" <>
Subject: Good news for neuros?
Date: Thu, 19 Aug 2004 15:44:30 -0700

Presumably one could "print" a functional human body from the neck down 
using an advanced form of this technology [Mark Plus]:

http://www.economist.com/science/PrinterFriendly.cfm?Story_ID=2724491

Press  print  for body parts

Jun 10th 2004
From The Economist print edition


Rapid prototyping: Advances in three-dimensional printing are opening up a 
number of new medical applications for the technology

. . . researchers at Advanced Ceramics Research in Tucson, Arizona, are 
developing rapid prototyping to create replacement bones, with funding from 
America's Office of Naval Research. The idea is that a patient with a 
shattered arm, for example, would have a section of replacement polymer bone 
made using data from CT and MRI scans. The artificial bone, porous and 
coated with a thin layer of calcium phosphate, is implanted into the arm in 
place of the damaged bone. Within a few weeks, the remaining real bone 
attaches itself to the implant and grows through the porous scaffold, 
encasing the implant in living bone within 18 months. The technique has 
already been successfully demonstrated in rats.

The next step will be to apply the technology to printing body organs, which 
would be built up by arranging individual cells, one layer at a time. 
According to Gregory Gratson, a researcher at the University of Illinois 
Urbana-Champaign, the printing process is quite benign, so living cells 
grown in culture should be able to survive it. Printing artificial organs 
could then make up for the lack of donor organs. It will, however, require 
printers capable of producing far finer details than are currently possible, 
in order to recreate the tiny cellular structures in livers and kidneys. But 
progress in the field is rapid. Results published earlier this year by Dr 
Gratson and his colleague Jennifer Lewis show that they have refined the 3D 
printing process to produce structures just 0.5 microns (millionths of a 
metre) across. This is a hundred times smaller than previously possible, and 
small enough to allow research into organ-printing to begin in earnest.

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