Sir, Your Liver Is Ready: Behind the Scenes of Bioprinting
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Senior research scientist Ben Shepherd removes stem cells from a bath of liquid nitrogen. The cells will be cultured to greatly increase their number before being loaded into the printer. Eventually these cells could be taken from a variety of places in a patient’s body –- fat, bone marrow and skin cells –- and made into a working vein.
After the cells are defrosted they are cultured in a growth medium (above). This allows the cells to multiply and grow so they can be used to form veins. The medium also uses special chemicals to tell the stem cells to grow into the cell type required, in this case blood-vessel cells. Once a enough cells are produced, they are separated from the growth medium using a centrifuge (below) and compressed into pellets.
Photos: Dave Bullock/Wired.com
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