Miracles and wonders: printing muscle

Printing human muscle.

The real news in health care is the extraordinary advances being made daily. A sampling:

In a small clean room tucked into the back of San Diego–based startup Organovo, Chirag Khatiwala is building a thin layer of human skeletal muscle. He inserts a cartridge of specially prepared muscle cells into a 3-D printer, which then deposits them in uniform, closely spaced lines in a petri dish. This arrangement allows the cells to grow and interact until they form working muscle tissue that is nearly indistinguishable from something removed from a human subject.

It is estimated between 130 - 170 million people worldwide are infected with the hepatitis C, can lead to scarring of the liver and cirrhosis. Although treatment with medication is available, it isn't effective in all cases and between 20 to 30 percent of those infected with hepatitis C develop some form of liver disease. Now a team at the University of Alberta has developed a vaccine from a single strain that is effective against all known strains of the disease.

Starting this spring, for about $5,000, any oncologist will be able to ship a sliver of tumor in a bar-coded package to Foundation's Medicine's lab. Foundation will extract the DNA, sequence scores of cancer genes, and prepare a report to steer doctors and patients toward drugs, most still in early testing, that are known to target the cellular defects caused by the DNA errors the analysis turns up. About 70 percent of cases studied to date have yielded information that a doctor could act on—whether by prescribing a particular drug, stopping treatment with another, or enrolling the patient in a clinical trial.

Medical scientists at Stanford have created a tiny computer chip capable of navigating the body's blood vessels while monitoring patient health and delivering drugs. While the device holds medical promise, it was a breakthrough in mathematics that allowed researchers to overcome previous barriers to powering the chip. Traditional batteries take up too much space, not to mention the problem of corrosion. By recalculating old equations and accounting for the body as an electricity insulator, magnetism became a suitable power source.