American and European scientists continue to advance forward in the healthcare arena using the latest 3D Printing Technology.  Few of the examples are illustrated below:

 Printing Human Embryonic Stem Cells –Stem cells printed in labs. The cells could be used to create tissue for testing drugs or growing replacement organs.  University of Edinburgh is leading the charge.

Printing Blood Vessels & Heart Tissue – Gabor Forgacs from the University of Missouri in Columbia and colleagues printed blood vessels and sheets of cardiac tissue that “beat” like a real heart.

Printing Skin – Lothar Koch of the Laser Center Hannover in Germany and colleagues laser-printed skin cells.

Patching a Broken Heart – Ralf Gaebel of the University of Rostock, Germany, and colleagues made a patch using a computerized laser-based printing technique.

Studying Cancer with Printed Cells – Printing cells could lead to better ways of studying diseases in the lab and then developing therapies. The study, led by biomedical engineer Utkan Demirci, of Harvard University Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, was detailed in February 2011 in Biotechnology Journal.

Printing Organs – Anothony Atala of Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, took stem cells from a patient with a failing bladder, grew a new bladder and transplanted it into the patient. Atala’s is focused on printing organs, and working on an experiment to print a transplantable kidney.