New tech fastens the age of organ manufacturing. “Creating live human tissue for medical study and clinical application has the potential to transform the future of medicine,” said Keith Murphy, CEO of Organovo, a San Diego-based firm that creates functioning human tissues.
Is manufacturing creativity? Then it may be possible to make human organs. If so, this would be the end of our rainbow.
For years, scientists have been able to grow cells in the lab. However, they’ve never been able to transform that tissue into a working organ.
Doctors could be able to simply use the patient’s own cells to create a kidney, rather than needing to locate a donor and hope the patient’s body doesn’t reject it.
Jennifer Lewis, a professor at Harvard University’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, says that 3D organ bioprinting could make this possible within a decade.
According to research published in 2019, 3D printing is used to build multicellular, growth factor, and biomaterial organs that are layered to mimic their natural counterparts using organ bioprinting.
Lewis said that “actual human need” is motivating this form of regenerative medicine now in the research and development stage.
According to the Health Resources & Services Administration, there were 106,075 men, women, and children on the national organ transplant waiting list in the United States as of June 10.
It is estimated that 6,000 organs are donated by live donors each year. However, the average number of organs donated by dead organ donors is three.
New tech fastens the age of organ manufacturing
Lewis said that people disagree because some people have terrible health problems. However, their organs aren’t good enough to donate or they weren’t on the organ donor list to begin with. It’s also hard to find a good match so that the transplanted organ doesn’t get rejected.
Dr. Anthony Atala, director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, says that “conducting surgery on someone who doesn’t need it” is a major risk.
As a result, “living related donors are not typically the desired route to go. Because you take an organ away from someone else who may need it, particularly now that we are older.”
In 2006, Atala and his colleagues were able to transplant a difficult organ into people for the first time. This is done by growing human bladders by hand. This helped save the lives of three children.
According to the Health Resources and Services Administration, 17 individuals die each day while waiting for an organ transplant. According to the service, a new individual is added to the waiting list every nine minutes. In 2021, about 90% of those on the transplant waiting list would benefit from a kidney transplant.
Worldwide, there are around one million people in need of a kidney. Lewis said that dialysis is the only option for those with end-stage renal failure. Once you begin dialysis, you have around five years to survive, and your death rate rises by 15% every year. “
Having dialysis is quite taxing on the body. When you think about it, printing organs is a huge undertaking. Drugs to lower blood pressure are not hard to get by. ” Martine Rothblatt, CEO and chairman of United Therapeutics, said at the Life Itself conference that “everyone who needs them may receive them.”
Bioprinting Procedure in Organ Manufacturing
She continued, “There is no practical reason why someone who needs one of these organs can’t have one.” “This issue can be solved with the help of technology.” An Introduction to Organ Printing Doctors often begin the bioprinting procedure with cells taken from the patient.
Doctors use tiny needle biopsies to examine an organ. They do very minimally invasive surgery to extract “less than half a postage stamp’s worth” of tissue.
In order to separate and expand cells outside the body, we need this little bit of tissue as a starting point.
“Media” (nutrients) are supplied to the cells every 24 hours in an incubator or bioreactor. This is a pressurized stainless steel tank that enables the cells to maintain their own metabolism, Lewis added.
Atala said that the incubator or bioreactor functions as a device that mimics the body’s physiological temperature and oxygenation, with a separate medium for each kind of cell.
In the end, we use this glue-like substance to bind everything together, according to Atala.
“The cells and glue that keep together every organ in your body are found in every cell.” “Extracellular matrix” is another term for it. It’s termed bioink because it’s made up of live cells, water-rich materials called hydrogels and medium. It also has a growth factors that help the cells grow and differentiate,” Lewis said.
The hydrogels are made to look like parts of the human body, like hyaluronic acid, collagen, and other proteins.
“It’s going to have the same qualities as the tissue you’re attempting to replace.” Atala said of the non-cell element of the glue.
Immune reaction
The biomaterials employed must normally be nontoxic, biodegradable and biocompatible. This is in order to prevent an adverse immune reaction. Collagen and gelatin are two of the most common biomaterials that are used to print tissues or organs.
Bioinks are loaded into a printing chamber “using a printhead and nozzle to extrude ink,” Lewis explained. “This is to extrude ink and build the material up layer by layer.”
Atala said that a patient’s X-rays or scans can be used to set up printers. This is so that they can make tissue with specific qualities.
Atala said there are multiple different cartridges with various colors, and you end up with your final color when using a color printer.
New tech fastens the age of organ manufacturing
Bioprinting is the same as printing with standard inks, except you’re utilizing cells instead. When printing organs or tissues, the fineness of the resolution and the number of printheads required all have a role in how long it takes.
However, it usually lasts from a few hours to a few days. According to Atala, the implantation process might take anywhere from four to six weeks after the biopsy. Achieving “the holy grail” is “getting the organs to really perform as they should,” Lewis said.
She continued, “You have to immediately get that organ into a bioreactor and start perfusing it as you would if you were to harvest an organ from a donor.”
To perfuse an organ is to move blood or a blood substitute through the organ’s blood vessels or other channels to give it liquid.
A bioreactor may be needed to further develop the tissue or to further drive connections, Lewis added. This depends on the organ’s complexity.
A lot of plumbing concerns and obstacles must be addressed in order for the printed organ to operate in vivo as a human organ would,” says the researcher (meaning in the body). And, to be honest, the problem hasn’t been entirely resolved.
There is no need to worry about the degrading of a bioprinted organ after its implantation into a patient since that’s how it is supposed to operate.
Your next question is likely to be, “What about the tissue?” Is it going to come apart? ‘ “Actually, no,” Atala said.
Read more: New UK Gel regenerates tissue and reverses heart attack damage
The Glues
These glues disintegrate, and the cells detect that the bridge is losing way; they know that they don’t have a solid foundation anymore. “ Hence, cells “build their own bridge and their own glue,” much as they do in your own body. “
Atala and Lewis are modest in their projections of how long it will be until bioprinted organs can be transplanted into people. Although great progress has been made in the sector, Lewis estimates that it will still take a decade or more for it to catch up.
When Atala spoke, he remarked, “I learned so many years ago not to anticipate because you’ll always be wrong,” and he meant it. When it comes to production and the supply chain, there are so many variables (US Food and Drug Administration regulation).
We, of course, want to make sure that the technologies are safe for the patient at the end of the day. “Patients and their caretakers shouldn’t have to worry about the cost of bioprinted organs in the future. Atala said they’ll be “available for sure.”
“The expense of organ failure is enormous. Just to maintain one patient on dialysis costs over a quarter of a million dollars every year. So, creating an organ that can be implanted into a patient is a lot less expensive.
Read: The downside of mutation everyone ignored
Data released by the American Society of Nephrology
There will be $442,500 in kidney transplant costs in 2020. This is according to data released by the American Society of Nephrology. However, 3D printers range from roughly $1,000 to over $100,000, depending on their sophistication.
Lewis also said that while there are low-cost printers, keeping patient cell banks, growing cells, and handling biological materials carefully may all be expensive parts of the bioprinting process.
“Harvesting the organ from the donor, the transportation fees, and then, of course, the operation that the recipient goes through, and then all the care and monitoring,” Lewis added. “Even if it was bio-printed, some of that expense would remain.”
Read more: Japan just figured out how to generate endless energy from the ocean
New tech fastens the age of organ manufacturing