Future Now
The IFTF Blog
3-d bioprinting (and other miscellaneous 3-d printing signals)
Three recent articles have looked at the pending commercialization of 3-d printing:
The first Wired piece got me wondering about how feasible the personalization of medical devices—stents designed for a person’s body, for example—would be and what sort of regulatory and other challenges this concept might present.
The second has some intriguing implications for food and health---and particularly nutrigenomics and personalized nutrition ideas. If, for example, you can, as one of the creators of the prototype suggests, “print a layer of butter at 1/1000 of a millimeter,” you can do all sorts of interesting things in terms of delivering nutrients in precisely structured ways.
Finally:> A Live Science article focuses on 3-d bioprinting of cells, tissues, etc. so that “Researchers can place liver cells on a preformed scaffold, support kidney cells with a co-printed scaffold, or form adjacent layers of epithelial and stromal soft tissue that grow into a mature tooth. Ultimately the idea would be for surgeons to have tissue on demand for various uses, and the best way to do that is get a number of bio-printers into the hands of researchers and give them the ability to make three dimensional tissues on demand.”
In sum, these