The structure had emerged from a refrigerator-size 3-D printer in Manchester, New Hampshire, at an outpost of United Therapeutics.
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One day, the company says, it plans to use a printer like this one to manufacture human lungs in “unlimited quantities” and overcome the severe shortage of donor organs.
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A lung made from collagen won’t help anyone: it’s to a real lung what a rubber chicken is to an actual hen. So United is also developing ways to impregnate the matrix with human cells so they’ll attach and burrow into it, bringing it alive.
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If organs could be manufactured in large numbers, it wouldn’t only solve the organ shortage. It could eventually reshape human life span. What about getting a new heart or lungs at 80? To get there, United will have to pull off not one but several technological moonshots.
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United is anticipating that its various technology projects—the 3-D-printed scaffold, the recellularization technique, and its effort to manufacture lung tissue from stem cells—will all intersect sometime in the future.
Read full, original post: Inside the effort to print lungs and breathe life into them with stem cells
