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In-Depth Information
Artiicial tissue or mini-organs that could be printed on demand would
serve as extremely useful research test beds.
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Artiicial tissue could be used
to study diseases, or to grow stem cells into mature, differentiated cells. Rather
than testing out new drugs on mice and petri dishes—both crude approxi-
mations of humans—if artiicial mini-organs could be 3D printed using a
speciic patient's cells, we could identify a drug candidate's effectiveness and
side effects much more accurately.
3D printed artiical mini-organs could help young surgeons train. Cadavers
have long been the training ground of choice, which poses several problems.
Most training hospitals can offer their students only a random assortment of
cadavers. In other words, people who've agreed to donate their body to sci-
ence are frustratingly prone to dying of causes that don't map neatly to course
curriculum or a particular research project.
A randomly selected cadaver works ine for teaching introductory level
courses. However, for advanced students (and medical researchers) eager to
delve deep into a particular specialty, this “one size its all” method limits
their options. For example, a medical school seeking to train students how
to operate on a brain tumor faces a dificult, nearly impossible task in legally
obtaining several fresh cadavers with brain tumors.
Until we can 3D print precise medical conditions, medical schools continue
to do their best. Even in hospitals that have state of the art operating chambers,
surgeons in training learn to operate using low-tech improvisations. When
I visited a major teaching hospital, one of the teaching staff showed me how
they trained students to do heart bypass surgery. The instructor stuffed two
pieces of a tee-shirt into a closed box, and told me that students are asked to
stitch the shirt's pieces together by inserting surgical tools through tiny holes
punched in the side of the box.
Printed model based on a CT scan for medical training
