These 3D-printed prosthetics for children are given to them free of charge. (via @techthatmatters)⠀
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Meet @teamunlimbited, a non-profit from the UK that’s on a mission to change the lives of children with missing limbs by helping them get custom 3D-printed prosthetics, free of charge.⠀
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The innovative 3D-printed arm devices are designed to empower and inspire children to improve their confidence and courage. Each innovative 3D printed arm device is made by volunteers and gives a helping hand to remove the long-standing stigma around discussing disability.⠀
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The prosthetics are cost-effective and easy to produce. They are fully parametric, thermo-formed 3D printed limbs that are light-weight, highly customizable and colourful. The average production cost is £30 (around $40) per arm. It’s a simple act of kindness that won’t get unnoticed.⠀
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Team UnLimbited designs are attractive alternatives to the current, clunky and expensive, prosthetic options available. The designs are open source and freely available to anyone in the world with a 3D printer. On average, an arm takes 24 hours to complete.
Like any complex machinery, it’s very difficult to understand how our organs work without seeing them in action. Technological advances over recent years have given scientists a glimpse into the inner workings of animal organs by making them transparent. Recently, a team of researchers have taken these techniques to a new level by applying them to organs from human cadavers. The chemicals used to make mouse tissue transparent struggle to make their way inside much stiffer human organs, so the team identified a new compound that allowed their entry deep within human organs rendering them transparent. Using a new imaging technology, they then mapped several whole human organs, including the kidney (shown here). Removing visual barriers will help scientists study intact human organs in detail, including the brain, and the maps created with this new approach could in future help doctors create 3D printed artificial organs for transplants.
Written by Gaëlle Coullon
Image by the Ertürk lab, Helmholtz Zentrum München
Insititute for Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine (iTERM), Helmholtz Zentrum München, Neuherberg, Germany
Image copyright held by the original authors
Research published in Cell, February 2020
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We’ve discovered a new shape called the scutoid, which lets cells pack so closely together – and could lead to better methods for making artificial organs. Powered by AutoBlogger.co
Scientists made and tested a new artificial heart, and it could change lives
We’ve heard of scientists growing organs in petri dishes. But now, a group of Swiss researchers are taking an alternative route: combining 3-D printing and soft robotics to develop a prosthetic heart.
The heart is squishy, flexible and able to pump actual liquids from its chambers, which is important since the heart is responsible for pumping our blood. And considering that doctors have performed at least 67,000 heart transplants since 1988, there’s a great chance that people will want to use this invention in the future.
In the United States, more than 4,000 people are on the waiting list to get a heart transplant. Read more. (7/14/17, 1:59 PM)
On July 3, 1952, a team of General Motors scientists and engineers finished development on the Dodrill-GMR Mechanical Heart—the mechanical heart pump used in 1952 for the world’s first successful open heart surgery. GM developed the device for the heart surgery team at Wayne State University in Detroit, and donated the machine to the hospital at no cost to the university.
The device was developed to keep patients alive during open-heart surgery. A precursor to modern heart-lung machines, the Dodrill-GMR Mechanical Heart was used to sustain the patient’s blood-pumping functions during the operation.
Bioprinting originated in the early 2000s, when it was discovered that living cells could be sprayed through the nozzles of inkjet printers without damaging them. Today, using multiple print heads to squirt out different cell types, along with polymers that help keep the structure in shape, it is possible to deposit layer upon layer of cells that will bind together and grow into living, functional tissue. Researchers in various places are tinkering with kidney and liver tissue, skin, bones and cartilage, as well as the networks of blood vessels needed to keep body parts alive. They have implanted printed ears, bones and muscles into animals, and watched these integrate properly with their hosts. Last year a group at Northwestern University, in Chicago, even printed working prosthetic ovaries for mice. The recipients were able to conceive and give birth with the aid of these artificial organs.
No one is yet talking of printing gonads for people. But blood vessels are a different matter. Sichuan Revotek, a biotechnology company based in Chengdu, China, has successfully implanted a printed section of artery into a monkey. This is the first step in trials of a technique intended for use in humans. Similarly, Organovo, a firm in San Diego, announced in December that it had transplanted printed human-liver tissue into mice, and that this tissue had survived and worked. Organovo hopes, within three to five years, to develop this procedure into a treatment for chronic liver failure and for inborn errors of metabolism in young children. The market for such treatments in America alone, the firm estimates, is worth more than $3bn a year.
Johnson & Johnson, a large American health-care company, is so convinced that bioprinting will transform parts of medical practice that it has formed several alliances with interested academics and biotechnology firms. One of these alliances, with Tissue Regeneration Systems, a firm in Michigan, is intended to develop implants for the treatment of defects in broken bones. Another, with Aspect, a biotechnology company in Canada, is trying to work out how to print parts of the human knee known as the meniscuses. These are crescent-shaped cartilage pads that separate the femur from the tibia, and act as shock absorbers between these two bones—a role that causes huge wear and tear, which sometimes requires surgical intervention.
More immediately, bioprinting can help with the development and testing of other sorts of treatments. Organovo already offers kidney and liver tissue for screening potential drugs for efficacy and safety. If this takes off it will please animal-rights activists, as it should cut down on the number of animal trials. It will please drug companies, too, since the tissue being tested is human, so the results obtained should be more reliable than ones from tests on other species.
With similar motives in mind, L’Oréal, a French cosmetics firm, Procter & Gamble, an American consumer-goods company, and BASF, a German chemical concern, are working on printing human skin. They propose to use it to test their products for adverse reactions. L’Oréal already grows about five square metres of skin a year using older and slower technology. Bioprinting will permit it to grow much more, and also allow different skin types and textures to be printed.
Printed skin might eventually be employed for grafts—repairing burns and ulcers. Plans are also afoot, as it were, to print skin directly onto the surface of the body. Renovacare, a firm in Pennsylvania, has developed a gun that will spray skin stem cells directly onto the wounds of burns victims. (Stem cells are cells that proliferate to produce all of the cell types that a tissue is composed of.) The suggestion is that the stem cells in question will come from the patient himself, meaning that there is no risk of his immune system rejecting the new tissue.
The real prize of all this effort would be to be able to print entire organs. For kidneys, Roots Analysis, a medical-technology consultancy, reckons that should be possible in about six years’ time. Livers, which have a natural tendency to regenerate anyway, should also arrive reasonably soon. Hearts, with their complex internal geometries, will take longer. In all cases, though, printed organs would mean that those awaiting transplants have to wait neither for the altruism of another nor the death of a stranger to provide the means to save their own lives.
Physicians at the University of Rochester Medical Center have developed a new way to use 3D printing to fabricate artificial organs and human anatomy that mimics the real thing, even up to the point of bleeding when cut.
These models are able to create highly realistic simulations for training and could soon be widely used to rehearse complex cases prior to surgery.
Photo: Microscopic 3D printed blood vessel structure (credit: Erik Jepsen/UC San Diego Publications)
Nanoengineers 3D printed functional blood vessel network that could pave the way toward Artificial Organs and Regenerative Therapies
The new research, led by nanoengineering professor Shaochen Chen, addresses one of the biggest challenges in tissue engineering: creating lifelike tissues and organs with functioning vasculature, networks of blood vessels that can transport blood, nutrients, waste and other biological materials, and do so safely when implanted inside the body.
Researchers from other labs have used different 3D printing technologies to create artificial blood vessels. But existing technologies are slow, costly and mainly produce simple structures, such as a single blood vessel, a tube, basically. These blood vessels also are not capable of integrating with the body’s own vascular system.
Check more https://adalidda.com/posts/dQeZQsMbuAArRtKNK/nanoengineers-3d-printed-functional-blood-vessel-network
