Can a Printer Provide Health Benefits?
It used to be that you would buy a watch to tell the time, or a phone to make a call. But these days, as everyone knows, watches and phones can pretty much make the morning coffee. Now it seems that printers are following in the same footsteps. Today, there are 3D printers which seem to be able to do so much more than just print out a page or ten. Indeed, they have the capacity to express what one’s mind has conceptualized in a 3D object which can result in so many more advancements.
That’s cool in and of itself. But there’s more. 3D printers are also able to roll out artificial blood vessels. The next step may be the involvement of transplants of lab-created organs. This is great news because until now this was a huge block in the area of tissue engineering as no one knew how to supply artificial tissue with nutrients that need capillary vessels to arrive. Thus the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany research team took this strategy and by using 3D printing along with multiphoton polymerization has, according to an article in Coolest-Gadgets, “reaped dividends.”
Big Steps in the Medical World
If this new capacity does actually transpire, it will be huge for the medical world. It first needs to be determined as a safe method and receive international approval. Next month the results will be revealed at the Biotechnica Fair in Germany. This is for sure a huge step that will increase the amount of patients who will have access to “life-saving organ transplant surgeries,” given that today’s waiting list for organ transplants always runs into the thousands, throughout the world. Indeed, the ability to “grow artificial tissue that works seamlessly in a human body? That’s nothing short of a modern medical miracle.”
