“The cells are actually the tissue engineers, so the people that do the work are just cheerleaders,” said Rocky Tuan, director of the Center for Cellular and Molecular Engineering at the University of Pittsburgh. “When we do tissue engineering, we are accelerating what the cells normally do. I tell people it’s assisted living, because we help the cells. We build all the houses and everything, and then we say, ‘Cells, come in and do your thing.’ ” If the cells do their thing correctly, the organ lives and grows just as the original once did.
Another huge challenge is common to much new research: lack of money.
“If the federal government created a ‘human organ project’ and wanted to make the kidney, I literally think it could happen in 10 years,” said chemical engineer Keith Murphy, co-founder of Organovo, a firm that makes and works with high-end bioprinters. But that would require a massive commitment of people, resources and billions of dollars, he said.
Once scientists get over the financial and technical hurdles of bioprinting, they will have to square the process with the Food and Drug Administration, which will have to decide how to regulate something that is not simply a device, a biological product or a drug, but potentially all three.
Before printed organs are implanted into people, bioprinting may be used in other ways. Murphy’s group is working on a project that will replicate tissue for testing the effects of medications, particularly cancer drugs. This could eliminate some of the drawn-out, trial-and-error process of trying a series of drugs on a person before finding one that works.
While a complex organ would be the holy grail for most tissue engineers, some like to look even farther ahead, straight into science fiction.
“If one can bioprint functional human organ constructs, then bioprinting a whole human — or whatever will be the name for such a creature — is just a logical extension,” said Vladimir Mironov, a pioneer in the field who is working with computer companies to design better bioprinting software.
Others don’t know why anyone would want to do that.
“It’s a visionary idea,” said Mironov’s colleague Jonathan Butcher of Cornell, whose lab is working on printing heart valves. “But the usual method of human reproduction works pretty well.”
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