The Answer to the Organ Crisis: 3D Printing

Via 3Dprint.com

Every single year, 11,000 people die due to not getting an organ fast enough.  This is what experts are starting to call the organ crisis, thousands of people die every year due to not having enough organs to give to people that need it.  This problem isn't necessarily our fault, nobody can really help the fact that if somebody needs a heart and nobody has one you can't give it to them, we don't have extra hearts.  In this horror of a situation with no foreseeable solution, an answer came, 3D Printing.  When 3D printing became available to consumers, everybody wanted to start printing their favorite movie action figure or a Yoda head, soon enough though people started using it for useful purposes.  In 2003 a researcher at Clemson University named Thomas Boland discovered that by taking biological materials and combining them with use in a printer you could create a scaffolding for organisms to live on.  This process is known as bioprinting, starting out with the original cell or bacteria (what ever they need printed) then letting it multiply in a petri dish. Then this cell matter is made into a biological ink, that the printer can use, then the printer must produce the required tissue or organ from the ink it is given.  This is the basis of 3D printing organs.

Sadly, its not as simple as that.  Some of the time, the body will reject the created organ because it is not close enough to the source.  Think about how the body won't accept normal transplants, the living transplant was grown on a human by a human, much less foreign than a piece of bio engineered substance, it must be done to perfection to be able to print a organ correctly.  It is also extremely hard to create the actual functioning organ, this is the other big concern about organ transplants.  We have to think about form and function for this, they can create the form of the organ but it is too difficult to create the exact function of an important organ like a liver or a heart.  We can create tissue right now but are no where near close to getting a full organ.  This could be the answer to all of our organ issues but it requires much more research before it can be fully put into plan and action.  There is a possibility that we could never get the biological ink correct and these artificial organs will never be created perfectly and some people won't be able to accept them, but those are the chances we must take to save the thousands that die each year.  First we must ask ourselves if it is really worth it to embark upon a research project that could have a dead-end.  Then we must consider if maybe taking a whole new route to the problem is necessary, I believe that if we keep on looking for more opportunities we can discover something that will save thousands.