One of the very few non-gun-related 3D printing stories to make the mass media this year was about Australian researchers who developed a technique which may lead to the production of human tissues, and even organs.
A 3D printer can create a scaffold from implantable biomaterials that degrade safely in the body, allowing new tissues to grow.
New developments also allow printing of living cells or tiny pieces of tissue harvested from a patient biopsy and grown in the laboratory to engineer new functional tissues. Because in the ideal situation this tissue originates from the patient’s own cells, the chance of rejection is almost nil. And the technique is not limited to a specific tissue – it is a generic approach...
