Hearts and Arteries Could Be 3D-Printed Cheaply

Any patient who needs an organ transplant has to put her name on a list. Wouldn’t it be better if doctors could simply print out a liver or a heart on demand?

At Carnegie Mellon University, researchers are making big strides toward this future.

They bought a consumer-level 3-D printer anyone can purchase online for about $1,000, and hacked it to print soft materials.

“We’ve been able to take MRI images of coronary arteries and 3-D images of embryonic hearts and 3-D bioprint them with unprecedented resolution,” Adam Feinberg, an associate professor of Materials Science and Engineering and Biomedical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, said in a press release.

Like most 3-D printers, the one Feinberg and his team purchased was designed to print plastic or metal. Normally, it deposits material onto a surface layer-by-layer until the object is built up into the required shape.

Printing soft materials is a bigger challenge because the materials normally collapse under their own weight when printed. Imagine trying to print Jello layer-by-layer. It wouldn’t hold its shape. And printers capable of creating soft objects cost about $100,000 each.

Feinberg and his team hacked the inexpensive printer to print gooey, biological material such as collagen, the connective tissue that keeps….READ MORE