The Latest Man-Made Organs
Tuesday, September 16, 2008 - 14:56
in Health & Medicine
Almost 100,000 people languish on organ-transplant waiting lists. But new tissue-fabrication techniques should make swapping in a man-made liver as easy as snapping Lego bricks into place. Blood vessels Method: 3-D printer When: 5 years Gabor Forgacs, a tissue engineer at the University of Missouri, is making blood-vessel networks by culturing three types of vessel cells and loading them into a fridge-size bioprinter. This machine prints out the cells to build capillaries in preprogrammed patterns. Liver read more