this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2023
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I wish there were a bigger investment in 3D printing organs. They won't have these issues.
It's not really an investment thing from my POV. Sure, throwing money at it will speed up research a bit, but there are a huge number of challenges that need to be overcome first, the biggest of these would probably be tissue perfusion - cells tend to die due to lack of nutrients and oxygen. Way too many issues with printing right now. Xenografts are a safer and quicker bet right now because you need to consider immunogenics anyway - if you can't make pig hearts work, you likely won't get patient-specific implants to work either. It's not quite as easy as just 3D-Printing patient stem cells.
Source?
It does appear to be a real thing see here
Not sure how far along this kind of technology is though.
It appears to be in the early stages of research, tackling the square one problems of how to assemble macrostructures from living cells without damaging them, while keeping them alive, while keeping the whole thing sterile. I would say this is a concept. It has zero demonstrated practical success and is still a decade minimum away from being able to attempt to get it.
Still I think it’s an inevitable technology that we should invest in. Once we can control the development of cells through genetic manipulation, and assemble them into macrostructures, we’ll be able to do quite a lot, and there seem to be advancements on the former frontier all the time. We just don’t know how to get all those stem cells we convinced to become liver tissue together into a liver.
Source that 3D printed organs printed using the patient's own DNA wouldn't have rejection issues like a pig heart? I mean I can look one up for you if you really need me to, but I would think that would be pretty obvious.
I suspect that they meant a source that indicates that this is a path of research that is currently being pursued and likely not due to skepticism, but rather interest. I can understand, because I didn't know it was something that people were actually researching; I mean, I first heard of the idea in a sci-fi novel!
Personally, I like to try to give people the benefit of the doubt, so I'm going to assume that maybe you were/are just having a bad day and didn't mean to be rude. I hope that the rest of your day was/is better!
I didn't mean to be rude. I was honestly confused.