Great interview on tonight’s Bob Pritchard Radio Show globally at 5pm Los Angeles time. Keith Agoada of Producers Market talks about how Blockchain will revolutionize distribution of all food products. A terrific interview.
Researchers in Spain have developed a 3-D bioprinter capable of producing human skin that is adequate for transplant into patients, or for testing drugs and cosmetics.
3-D printing technology has applications in very many fields. In medicine, for example, several groups worldwide are exploring ways to use 3-D printing to grow the complex tissues and organs of the human body. One group has successfully created a human ear, while another is working on 3-D printing bone tissue.
One of the challenges of making human body parts with 3-D printing is not only replicating the complexity of the structures, but also ensuring that they survive transplantation in a living body. The researchers in Spain have already engineered plasma-based, two-layered skin that has been used successfully to treat burns and other wounds in a large number of patients. With this method it can take 3 weeks to produce the amount of skin required to cover an extensive burn or large wound. The other drawback is that much of the process is performed manually.
In the new study using the 3-D bioprinting method they generated a large (100 x 100 cm or 40 x 40 ins) area of skin in under 35 minutes – including the 30 minutes “required for fibrin gelation.” This method of bioprinting allows skin to be generated in a standardized, automated way, and the process is less expensive than manual production.
Instead of ink cartridges, the 3-D bioprinter uses biological components. Experts say that these “bio-inks” are the key to the successful 3-D printing of human tissue and organs. As with their existing plasma-based, manual method, the skin-printing technology generates two layers of skin: the epidermis and the dermis.
It prints the epidermis, including the stratum corneum (the protective outermost layer comprising keratinized cells). Then, it prints the deeper, thicker dermis, complete with fibroblasts that make collagen (the protein that gives skin its strength and elasticity). Knowing how to mix the biological components, in what conditions to work with them so that the cells don’t deteriorate, and how to correctly deposit the product is critical to the system. A computer controls the bioprinting process in order to precisely deposit the bio-inks on a print bed to make the skin.
The generated skin was very similar to human skin and was indistinguishable from bilayered dermo-epidermal equivalents, handmade in the laboratories. The two main applications for the new technique are to produce non-person-specific skin from a stock of cells on a large scale for research and laboratory-testing of cosmetics and drugs and the other is to produce person-specific skin using cells from individual patients to treat burns and other wounds.
The 3-D bioprinter only uses human components to produce active skin that makes its own human collagen. It does not use animal collagen.The bio-inks are patented and the 3-D bioprinter has been submitted for approval by various European regulators. The team is also exploring how to use the new technology to print other human tissues.
President Trump is prepared to stop the trade war with China, in exchange for their wall