“Printing” body organs
Anthony Atala’s state-of-the-art lab grows human organs — from muscles to blood vessels to bladders, and more. At TEDMED, he shows footage of his bio-engineers working with some of its sci-fi gizmos, including an oven-like bioreactor (preheat to 98.6 F) and a machine that “prints” human tissue.
“So, that’s a challenge, not just for organs but also for tissues. Trying to replace pancreas, trying to replace nerves that can help us with Parkinson’s. These are major issues. This is actually a very stunning statistic. Every 30 seconds a patient dies from diseases that could be treated with tissue regeneration or replacement. So, what can we do about it? We’ve talked about stem cells tonight. That’s a way to do it.But still ways to go to get stem cells into patients, in terms of actual therapies for organs.
Wouldn’t it be great if our bodies could regenerate? Wouldn’t it be great if we could actually harness the power of our bodies, to actually heal ourselves? It’s not really that foreign of a concept, actually; it happens on the Earth every day. This is actually a picture of a salamander. Salamanders have this amazing capacity to regenerate. You see here a little video. This is actually a limb injury in this salamander. And this is actually real photography, timed photography, showing how that limb regeneratesin a period of days. You see the scar form. And that scar actually grows out a new limb.”
More: http://www.ted.com/talks/anthony_atala_growing_organs_engineering_tissue
FiveWordsForTheFuture - Oct 5, 2014 | Bionics, Biotechnologies, Medicine, Print, Sciences, Synthetic Nature, Video
Tagged | 3D printing, medicine, synthetic biology
RSS - Posts
FiveWordsForTheFuture nasce per aiutare a riconoscere e capire l'innovazione, a immaginare il futuro nel senso di pensarsi in un tempo possibile, prossimo e concreto.
FiveWordsForTheFuture has been realized to help people in identifying and understanding innovation. Its aim is to imagine Our Future, through an inquiry into its concrete possibilities and by looking forward to those next, near realities that are going to come.
