How Close Are We to Creating Human Organs on a 3D Printer?

• Published in: Texas monthly (Austin) 2020-03
• Main Author: Vine, Katy
• Format: Magazinearticle
• Language: English
• Subjects: 3-D printers; Bioengineering; Bladder; Blood & organ donations; Lungs; Medical research; Researchers
• ISSN: 0148-7736; 2163-3274

(Though, two decades on, engineered bladders still haven’t been approved by the FDA for widespread use.) The potential use of printers in this process was pioneered in 2000 by Thomas Boland, a researcher then at Clemson University who filled the ink tanks of a standard desktop printer with bio-inks—cellular material suspended in a solution—and created cells. At a much-ballyhooed TED Talk in 2011, Anthony Atala of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, who was part of the Harvard team that created the artificial bladder, garnered press attention when he revealed onstage what many at first mistook for a functional human kidney that his lab had printed. Two years ago, when Miller and Grigoryan realized they were on to something, they founded their own company, Volumetric, looking to commercialize the technology they created, which now powers a 3D Printer called Lumen X. (Rice owns the intellectual property they developed while working at the university, and Volumetric has exclusive license for its use.) Miller was inspired to pursue a career in tissue engineering as an undergraduate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2001, after attending a professor’s talk about the potential for using skin scaffolds to aid in the healing of burn victims. “Because our bodies share design patterns that we see in plants, we can use plant-derived algorithms to design architecture for human tissue.”