TED 2011: Print-on-Demand Organs the Future of Medicine
- 3:32 pm |
LONG BEACH, California — Wouldn’t it be great if transplant patients could simply order up an organ, like a tailor-made suit of clothes? Better yet, what if they could have the organ created from their own cells so there would be no risk of rejection? And what if it could be crafted in a mere seven hours so patients wouldn’t have to wait months or years to have it implanted?
Since we’re dreaming, why can’t we have the organ manufactured in a 3-D printer, using live cells instead of ink, so that a brand-new kidney, pink with vitality, could be lifted straight from the printer bed and placed in a body?
We can, actually. Or, one day will be able to do this, according to Dr. Anthony Atala, director of the the Institute for Regenerative Medicine at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center, who stunned the audience at the Technology Entertainment and Design conference (TED) last Thursday when he donned a surgical glove to handle a kidney-shaped mold that had come from a 3-D printer rolled onto the stage.
The organ was just a model, not an operational kidney with blood vessels, but served to show how easily real organs will be created one day.
Aside from the cool factor, there is a tremendous practical need for this kind of sorcery: In the past decade the number of patients requiring an organ transplant has doubled, yet the number of transplants being performed has remained nearly the same.
“Patients are dying every day because we don’t have enough of those organs to go around,” Atala said.
Atala demonstrated how the printer would work and talked about a number of other cutting-edge procedures that are being developed for organ-transplant patients as well as for burn patients.
In the case of printed organs, tissue smaller than a postage stamp would be taken from a patient’s body in order to harvest cells that could be grown outside the body.
A CT scan would be used to examine the patient’s existing organ, layer by layer using computerized imaging analysis and 3-D reconstruction. That data would be fed into the printer to control the size and shape of the organ to be produced. Once enough cells for an organ are grown, they would be mixed with biodegradable gel for binding and nourishment and placed in the printer’s ink cartridge.
As each layer of cells was “printed” out, the cartridge would rise, like an elevator, to produce the next layer of the organ until it was completed. Atala said it would take about seven hours to print a kidney, which could then be implanted in the patient’s body.
The 3-D printer is still a number of years away from being a viable option for transplant patients, Atala told Wired.com after his talk, but a different printer technology for burn patients is much closer to clinical use.
The device scans a burn to gather information about the wound and determine how many layers of cells need to be applied and where they should go. The cells are mixed with gel so they adhere to the patient and are then sprayed onto the wound as the scanner passes over it.
Another type of printer, currently being developed could cover larger wound areas. Fashioned like a flatbed scanner, it would pass over a patient lying on a bed and scan the wound to gather data, then pass over again to “print” layers of new cells onto wounded areas.
“You could do an entire arm or leg with the scanner,” Atala told Wired.com. The device would even work on 3rd-degree burns, but is about five years away from clinical use.
Regenerative medicine is not a new field. Atala pointed to a book published in 1938, the Culture of Organs, which laid the groundwork for tissue technology.
But there have been few clinical advances over the years, due to a number of challenges. These included finding a way to grow cells outside the body; designing scaffolding from biomaterials that would serve as a mold on which to grow cells and then dissolve in the body; and delivering blood to regenerated organs to keep them alive. Over the last 20 years, all of these challenges have been successfully met, Atala said.
And although there are still certain cells that can’t be grown outside the body — liver, nerve and pancreatic cells — other cells, including stem cells, have proven to be highly cooperative.
About 10 years ago, Atala and others began building replacement organs using a patient’s own cells and biomaterial scaffolding.
A small piece of tissue is taken from the patient’s organ, such as a bladder. Cells from the tissue are grown outside the body and layered onto a scaffold made from biomaterial and molded into the shape of the organ.
The cell-covered scaffold is placed in an oven-like device that mimics conditions in the human body — such as 95 percent oxygen and a temperature of 37 degrees centigrade. After a few weeks, the engineered organ is ready to be implanted in the patient.
Luke Massella was one patient who benefited from this technology. Massella, who appeared on stage with Atala, had been born with spina bifida, which affected his bladder and kidneys. He’d undergone 16 surgeries and at the age of 10 was facing a lifetime of dialysis when Atala offered him experimental surgery with a regenerated bladder. He was among the first patients to receive a bladder constructed from his own cells. Today, he’s a sophomore at the University of Connecticut living a normal and active lifestyle.
“When I was 10, I didn’t realize how amazing it was,” Massella told the TED audience. “I was a little kid. I was like, yeah I’ll have that, I’ll have that surgery. All I wanted to do was to get better, and I didn’t realize how amazing it really was until now that I’m older and I see the amazing things that he’s doing.”