Additive manufacturing, or its more commonly-referred to description as 3D printing, has been in the news a lot over the last few weeks, with stories about varied uses such as printing musical instruments, plastic magazines for rifles, and moonbases for European space missions. Now, a joint venture between academics at Edinburgh’s Heriot-Watt University and private company Roslin Cellab has made the application of 3D printing in a branch of medicine more practicable by successfully making three dimensional arrangements of human embryonic stem (ES) cells.
Other researchers have achieved this medical feat in the past using mouse ES cells, which are more robust than their human counterparts and so can survive tougher handling. Experiments on human ES cells, however, lead to results more immediately applicable to human beings. The new approach uses pneumatic pressure coupled with a sensitive micro-valve to limit damaging forces acting on the cells.
With the right stimulation, embryonic stem cells can grow into a wide variety of other cell types (known as pluripotency) and can divide almost indefinitely. These properties coupled with 3D printing techniques that can handle them delicately enough point to the intriguing possibility of being able to grow human tissue types in the laboratory and, more speculatively, entire organs structured the same as their natural equivalents, complete with networks of blood vessels and nerves. While this use of the technology remains in the realm of science fiction, the controversy surrounding the use of human ES cells is very much rooted in reality. ES cells can only be destructively extracted from fertilized human embryos and U.S. opponents of human ES cells have lobbied extensively to shut down government support for research. In January, the U.S. Supreme Court killed one such challenge by refusing to hear it, thereby freeing up researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to continue working with 195 human ES cell lines.
The Scottish team is hoping to commercialize the technology to produce tissue samples for use in toxicity testing of drug compounds for human use, which has traditionally used animal models. Using human tissues instead of animals would not only remove one of the main ethical complaints about the drug industry, but also produce data that more accurately reflects actual drug behavior in human beings.
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