Cry Me A Liver
Medical transplants can come with all sorts of obstacles for patients to try and navigate around. Finding a donor in the United States is difficult when only 3 out of 1,000 people die in such a way that their organs can be transplanted, and just 58% of the population is registered to donate. This makes it so that twenty people die everyday waiting for a transplant that could’ve saved their lives.
So, almost naturally in this day in age, biomedical engineers and physicians turned to technology to help solve this issue. They’ve come to the conclusion of 3D printing major organs of the human body, specifically the liver. If you’re unfamiliar with 3D printers, they’re made with basically the same concept as normal 2D printers (in the sense where you send something to them, they’ll print a copy of it), but it uses plastic and a seriously meticulous “printing” process to make 3D objects. Here’s a short video if you would like to see one while it’s on.
Even though this video is sped up, you might be able to tell how long this would take. The part that moves around with the plastic moves in layers smaller than the size of this font repeatedly until it makes a compact version of whatever it is you printed. In my sophomore year of high school, I used one to make a small boat propeller about two inches wide, and it took about an hour to do. So you can imagine something as specific as creating human liver cells that require oxygen, divide constantly, and require not only a brilliant design but an amazing printer would take way longer—and it would require much more funding than what we got for our science department.
But, if you put technicalities aside, this could be the next major medical breakthrough. Your body is an incredibly complex system, made up even more mindboggling smaller system such as the liver that all work together to (putting it very simply here) do one overarching task of keeping you alive. As I alluded to before, livers are not easy to recreate, so this, to me at least is something very, very exciting, and we’ll make sure to keep you guys updated on any more news.
As, with any information you get, make sure to Check. The. Sources! I’ve linked some of the research papers on this topic down below if you’re interested in reading the actual science and practice that went into this, but otherwise you can check out AIM’s Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter that are also linked down below. 😀
https://nyaspubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1749-6632.1997.tb52212.x
https://aasldpubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/lt.23729
