Body shop of the future

Regenerative medicine’s once-wild ideas are fast becoming reality, Smithsonian reports.

Late last year, Organovo, a biotech company in San Diego, began distributing the first commercially available body-part printer. Yes, you read correctly: a printer for body parts. Using the same idea as an ink-jet printer, it jets laser-guided droplets of cells and scaffold material onto a movable platform. With each pass of the printer head, the platform sinks, and the deposited material gradually builds up a 3-D piece of tissue. Regenerative medicine laboratories around the world have relied on the printer to generate pieces of skin, muscle and blood vessels.

Anthony Atala, director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, and colleagues use human cells to grow muscles, blood vessels, skin and even a complete urinary bladder. Atala’s lab has used the technology to construct a two-chambered mouse-size heart in about 40 minutes.

They have also managed to fashion lab-built kidneys that produce urine when implanted into experimental animals. And within a few years, he says, human skin could be coaxed into growing in a lab and be given to burn victims and other patients who today must undergo painful skin grafts.

Organs grown outside the body will transform medicine, Atala predicts, but spurring repair and regrowth within the body will be just as important. He and other scientists foresee injecting healthy cells and growth-inducing molecules into diseased or injured lungs, livers and hearts, prompting them to regenerate. Then there’s the ultimate challenge: Could a patient someday regrow an entire limb?

“It is not outside the realm of possibility,” Atala says. “If a salamander can do it, why can’t a human?”