3D bioprinted human organs

To save patients with acute liver failure

Organ transplantation has already been treated as an intransposable limit of medicine, or there is a donor or the patient leaves this plan for another, but a new project in the United States is trying to break that logic of root using something that until recently seemed like science fiction, 3D bioprinted human organs.

A team led by Carnegie University announced Mellon the development of a 3D bio-printed functional liver specifically designed to save patients with acute liver failure, the project called PRINT has just received funding of $28 million from the Arpa-H agency. The goal is not to replace the human liver permanently, it is something even more strategic.

In the human body, the liver is the only organ capable of complete regeneration. The problem is that, in cases of acute failure, the patient generally does not have enough time for this regeneration to occur. What the PRINT project proposes is to create a temporary liver capable of keeping the body functioning for two to four weeks, enough time for the patient's own organ to recover.

In practice, this may completely avoid the need for a definitive transplant.

This bioengineered liver is produced using a technique called Fresh 3D bioprinting, a method that allows extremely soft biological materials such as collagen and human cells to be printed without them collapsing. Instead of metal plastic, the organ is built with human liver stem cells organized into complex structures very close to the actual architecture of a liver.

The team hopes to have a bioprinted liver on an adult scale, ready for preclinical testing in up to 5 years and the liver is just the beginning, because according to the researchers, the same platform can be used for bioengineering hearts, kidneys, pancreas and other organs, including applications such as heart tissue for babies with congenital defects or insulin-producing cells for diabetics, when we start printing parts of the human body, the border between technology and life simply ceases to exist.