Every 30 seconds a patient dies from diseases that could be treat... by Anthony Atala

Every 30 seconds a patient dies from diseases that could be treated with tissue replacement.

Anthony Atala

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Categorized in : Disease Patient Tissues

[Our lab uses] a desktop inkjet printer, but instead of using ink... by Anthony Atala

[Our lab uses] a desktop inkjet printer, but instead of using ink, we're using cells.

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Building a solid organ like the liver in the lab is different and harder than with an organ like the bladder because solid organs are very vascular.

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When a patient does get an organ from another person, it comes from a different body. It has different properties, and a persons natural tendency is to reject that organ.

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The printing gives you scalability, because you can scale a technology up instead of making them by hand, it gives you reproducibility, because you can print them in the same manner every time, and it gives you precision, because it can precisely place the cells where you need them, it will eventually decrease the cost of the production of these technologies, because you're automating the process.

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We need to make sure that these technologies are reliable and reproducible, time and time again, before you put them into patients.

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Then we mix it with this gel, which is like a glue, every organ in your body has the cells and the glue that holds it together. Basically, that's also called' extracellular matrix.'.

You're probably wondering,' Well, then what happens to the tissue ? Will it fall apart ?' Actually, no, these glues dissolve, and the cells sense that the bridge is giving way ; they sense that they don't have a firm footing anymore. So cells do what they do in your very own body, which is to create their own bridge and create their own glue.

I learned so many years ago never to predict because you'll always be wrong, there's so many factors in terms of manufacturing and the( US Food and Drug Administration regulation). At the end of the day, our interest, of course, is to make sure the technologies are safe for the patient above all.