How 3-D Printing Body Parts Will Revolutionize Medicine
The Body Shop Kevin Hand Welcome to the age of bioprinting, where the machines we've built are building bits and pieces of us. A device the size of an espresso machine quietly whirs to life. The contraption isn't filled with fresh, pungent grounds but, instead, spoonfuls of opaque, sterile goo. Its robotic arm moves briskly: It hovers, lowers, and then repositions a pair of syringes over six petri dishes. In short, rapid-fire bursts, they extrude the milky paste. Soon, three little hexagons form in each dish. After a few minutes, the hexagons grow to honeycomb structures the size of fingernails. No one here is getting a latte anytime soon. The honeycombs are human livers, says Sharon Presnell, chief technology officer of Organovo-or at least the foundations of them. The tiny masterpieces of biomedical engineering are nearly identical to tissue samples from real human livers, and they are constructed from actual...