Artificial Blood Vessels Created On a 3D Printer

rallymatte writes "A team at Fraunhofer Institute in Germany has managed to create artificial blood vessels with a 3D printer that may come to be used for transplants of lab-created organs. From the article: 'To print something as small and complex as a blood vessel, the scientists combined the 3D printing technology with two-photon polymerisation — shining intense laser beams onto the material to stimulate the molecules in a very small focus point.'"

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[Dunbal]

Speaking as a person who is already carrying a good $50k worth of implants, my human side rejects this notion while my cyborg side says "bring it".

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[jamiesan]

Just don't miss your payments on the replacement organ. Wouldn't want it to be reposessed.

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[Anonymous Coward]

they werent interested in photos of your mom

What a headline

[arisvega]

.. and with such headlines, the population gets convinced that we got Star Trek technology standing by.

No wonder why half the population thinks that astronaut training takes places in "antigravity chambers".

(person at the hospital) "What do you mean you don't have this type of blood? Why don't you just print some, I read it on the news."

Re:What a headline

[Arancaytar]

(person at the hospital) "What do you mean you don't have this type of blood? Why don't you just print some, I read it on the news."

Blood vessel != blood cell. Or is that the joke?

The headline doesn't exaggerate. They need to make artificial capillaries for synthetic tissue, and now they've come up with a way to make them. It'll be years before this will have progressed far enough to be an actual product (let alone one that is routinely used on human patients), but that's how all research works.

good news!

[Anonymous Coward]

because the only thing more expensive than ink toner is human blood [boingboing.net]. oh wait...

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[mark-t]

The phrase "ink toner" is a contradiction in terms, making about as much logical sense as the notion of "dead survivors".

Because toner is *NOT* ink.

Ink is a liquid pigment, toner is dry.

Ink is simply absorbed into the substrate of whatever surface it is put upon, where toner is bonded to a surface through application of heat and pressure.

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[poofmeisterp]

I think the anonymous poster was going for humor on this. I laughed. Just food for thought.

Ew... bad mental image.

[Commontwist]

All of a sudden I had this image of printing kidneys, blood vessels and all, shooting out of a laser printer because someone clicked the wrong application.

"I said print out my organizer not organs!"

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[nurb432]

Just call it lunch and be happy.

bypass grafts

[lseltzer]

When my father was in for aortic valve replacement and bypass I asked the surgeon (Dr. Oz, the guy on TV a lot, did his surgery) and his cardiologist why there weren't artificial grafts. Instead they take vessels from the legs, adding another opportunity for infection and something else to heal, not to mention time to the procedure. They said that nobody had any success with it, they didn't know why. Venus grafts clog right back up pretty frequently; arterial grafts do much better, but you don't have a lot of arteries you can spare. TFA talks about capillaries, not coronary arteries. I'm not sure if the tissue needs would be any different.

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[Dunbal]

I have arterial grafts. But then again my surgeon wasn't famous.

Joining Blood Vessels Without Sutures

[simoncpu was here]

Joining Blood Vessels Without Sutures + Artificial Blood Vessels Created On a 3D Printer = WIN

Turnip Blood

[walkerp1]

Now the ink mongers can suck my blood more efficiently than ever before.

Laser two-photon polymerisation

[fishicist]

You bring the light from a pulsed laser to a very tight focus inside a photoresist -- the same type of chemical used in standard photolithography. When this photoresist absorbs light with a wavelength of, say, 400nm, it cross-links to become a fairly solid plastic. In normal photolith, you'd illuminate a controlled area with 400nm light.

In two-photon polymerisation, you start with light of, say, 800nm, and you rely on two photons being absorbed at the same time, which together have enough energy to do wha

I can imagine Quagmire would be enjoying this one

[MindPrison]

printing out whatever kinky stuff he needs :)

Oh Giggety, Giggety - GIGGETY!!

Artificial trachea implanted back in June

[Scrameustache]

http://www.npr.org/2011/07/11/137770068/windpipe-grown-from-stem-cells-implanted-in-man [npr.org]

So the fellow in Stockholm, who's name is Paolo Macchiarini, decided to try, first time - he thought the time was ripe to try an experiment in which they would take a scan of his trachea to make sure they had the exact dimensions. A fellow in London has invented this spongy plastic. It's porous. Make a model of his trachea that's exactly the right size. Meanwhile, a company in Massachusetts was making an incubator.

The mod

Looks interesting

[raymorphic]

Now we just need to see how the outcome turns out.