👂 When Will We Have 3D Printed Organs?
3DBio Therapeutics and the Future of 3D Printed Organs
In 2013 Wired published an exciting article: “Bioengineer: the heart is one of the easiest organs to bioprint, we'll do it in a decade”.
It’s nearly a decade later, and we still don’t have 3D printed hearts.
But thanks to a small company called 3DBio Therapeutics, we do now have 3D printed ears.
3D printing body parts has long been a sci-fi dream of the medical field, and as far as dreams go, this one is for good reason.
In the US, about 17 people die each day whilst waiting for an organ transplant. Even as people join the organ transplant list through death or donation, there is nevertheless an incredible shortage of organs, in particular of hearts, lungs and kidneys.
Even organs that are received may not be a match for other reasons, for example incompatible blood type or simply being the wrong size for the patient’s body shape.
And once the organ transplant takes place there is still the possibility that the organ will be rejected by the body, which happens about 10-15% of the time.
Hundreds of thousands of people spend years waiting for a transplant, and for many their transplant will come too late.
But perhaps it doesn’t have to be this way.
What if instead of sitting on a waitlist for years you could instead receive a new organ in a few days that was genetically identical to the one that is failing. One that was exactly the right size, and that your body definitely wouldn’t reject.
Imagine if every hospital had a 3D bioprinter just as they have a MRI or CT machine that could create such organs in a matter of days.
This would be an incredible leap in medicine, and would massively reduce human suffering.
So today we will dive into understanding 3D bioprinting and where it might go in the future:
What is 3D bioprinting and how does it work?
Why did 3DBio Therapeutics start with an ear?
What else is 3D bioprinting useful for?
How close are we to 3D bioprinting full organs?
Let’s get to it.
What is 3D bioprinting and how does it work?
The first 3D printers were invented in the late 1980s, and could print small objects from a computer model by building up thousands of thin layers of material.
In biotech, this is known as bioprinting, because the material used is living cells or other biological material.
Bioprinting happens in 4 stages:
1. A digital model is created of the organ or material to be printed. This could be using a CT or MRI scanner.
2. Certain cells are taken, multiplied and combined with other organic material to create a mixture known as bioink.
3. The bioink is then inserted into cartridges and loaded into the 3D bioprinter. There are different types of 3D bioprinter that can be used depending on the type of object being printed.
4. After printing, the object is treated with either ionic solution or UV light, which helps it stabilise.
This makes it sound more straightforward than it is.
One approach that has been tried for many years was to build a 3D scaffold which could be seeded with stem cells that would then grow into the shape of organs.
These techniques however lacked the precision to achieve the patterning and gradients of tissue that is needed in complex organs. 3D bioprinting should allow a much greater level of precision, needed to print entire organs.
Why did 3DBio Therapeutics start with an ear?
Back in June of this year, a milestone was reached. A small US biotech company, 3DBio Therapeutics, announced they had successfully implanted a 3D printed ear made with the patient’s own living cells.
3D printing an organ such as a liver or heart is naturally extremely difficult as they are such complex organs. Printing an ear is still hard, but nevertheless much more straightforward as there are no blood vessels in the ear cartilage. Printing functioning blood vessels is hard.
Anyway, in this case the patient suffered from what is known as microtia, which means she was born with one ear that was small and misshapen. About 1500 people in the US are born with microtia every year, and in addition to being obviously emotionally distressing, can also severely affect hearing.
So what 3DBio Therapeutics were able to do is to 3D-print a a collagen ear cartilage with the patient’s own cells, mirroring the ear on the other side of her head.
Even though this is a long way from printing a full organ, for microtia patients this is still a big improvement over the existing treatment option which relied on rib cartilage.
Yes that’s as painful as it sounds.
What else is 3D bioprinting useful for?
Beyond ears, progress is being made on other fronts, with trials under way for 3D printed skin that could help with severe or chronic wounds.
3D printed skin could eliminate the need for painful skin grafts, and provide alternative options for those whose skin is too badly damage for grafts.
L’Oreal is even working to bioprint human skin to test cosmetics.
Another use of bioprinting is in the pharmaceutical industry. Even whilst printing full organs is some way away, if complex tissues are able to be created with bioprinters, this will reduce the need for animal testing and lower costs for new drug development. Given the median cost to bring a new drug to market is around $900m, anything to bring this cost down, and reduce the suffering of lab animals would be a great advance.
How close are we to 3D bioprinting full organs?
As amazing as 3D bioprinting ear cartilage is, the ultimate goal is 3D printed organs.
When I said before that we don’t have 3D printed hearts, that wasn’t entirely true.
In 2019, Israeli researchers were able to print an entire heart, the only problem is it was a little small.
This small heart was a world first in that it was the first with a complete vascular system. Though still a long way from a heart that could be used in a transplant, it is nevertheless a big step forward.
Unfortunately getting to a full size heart is not just a question of scaling up the technology, there are a number of challenges.
Firstly it isn’t clear if the 3D printed structure could withstand the flow of blood at high pressure.
We don’t know whether the structure would remain stable when implanted in the body.
The heart needs to be ‘taught’ to function like a normal heart.
And this is just one organ. Each organ has its own idiosyncrasies and is complex in different ways, and there are 79 organs in the human body!
So even though we have made a lot of progress, scientists are still estimating it is 1-2 decades away from becoming a feasible medical treatment.
Printing full organs is clearly a little more challenging than Wired imagined a decade ago, but companies such as 3DBio Therapeutics and Cellink are making incredible progress.
Hopefully one day soon a 3D bioprinter will be coming to a hospital near you, and a lot of human suffering will be reduced.
Until next time,
Jamie
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