Tissue Engineer Prints Biocompatible Kidney Model Onstage at TED 2011

Anthony Atala, printed a biocompatible model of a human kidney on stage at the 2011 TED conference Thursday, in a technique that could someday be used to create new organs from a patient’s own tissue rather than relying on donated organs.

“It’s like baking a cake,” Atala said.

A few years ago, Atala figured out how to produce human tissue with a desktop inkjet printer, using cells as the printer ink. In a TED talk last year, he described printing heart valves and other tissues. This week at TED, he brought one of his patients on stage. When he was 10, Luke Massella was among the first people to receive a re-engineered organ — he was born with spina bifida and received a new bladder grown from his own tissue. Now he’s a healthy college student.

The organ-printing process employs scanners that collect a 3-D image of the organ that needs to be replaced. A small tissue sample seeds the printer, which replicates the tissue layer by layer to build a new organ, all in about six or seven hours. It would use the patient’s own tissue, so it avoids any organ rejection issues.


During Atala's talk, a specially designed printer was about three hours into printing a kidney model built out of biocompatible materials. He also brought a completed model to show to the audience.

Initial reports suggested Atala had printed a working kidney, but it was actually a kidney-shaped mold with no internal structures or vasculature, according to Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center, where Atala is a regenerative medicine specialist.


[link to www.popsci.com]