Straight to the heart: Makato Nakamura with the 3-D inkjet bioprinter.
Credit: AFP
TOYAMA, JAPAN: The technology is the same as that of the simple inkjet printer found in homes and offices, but Japanese scientist Makoto Nakamura is on a mission to see if it can also produce human organs.
The idea is for the printer to jet out thousands of cells per second – rather than ink droplets – and to build them up into a three-dimensional (3-D) organ.
"It would be like building a huge skyscraper on a micro level using different kinds of cells and other materials instead of steel beams, concrete and glass," he said.
Ultimate goal
"Ultimately I hope to make a heart," said Nakamura, professor at the graduate school of science and technology for research at the state-run University of Toyama.
While Nakamura says it would take him some 20 years to develop a heart, the feat could pave the way to mass produce "good hearts" for patients waiting for transplants. A heart made of cells originating from the patient could eliminate fears that the body would reject it.
In the emerging field of organ printing, Nakamura bills his work as the world's finest printed 3-D structure with living cells.
The technology works a bit like dealing with sliced fruit: an organ is cut horizontally, allowing researchers to see an array of cells on the surface.
Sliced fruit
If a printer drops cells one by one into the right spots and repeats the process for many layers, it creates a 3-D organ. Much like a printer chooses different colours, the machine can position different types of cells to drop.
Nakamura has succeeded in building a tube with living cells. It measures one millimetre in diameter and has double walls with two different kinds of cells, similar to the three-layer structure in human blood vessels.
He has also made a smaller single-wall hydrogel tube that measures one-tenth of a millimetre – as narrow as human hair.
The tubes are made by a 3-D inkjet bioprinter that Nakamura's team developed in a three-year project completed earlier this year at Kanagawa Academy of Science and Technology, a foundation based southwest of Tokyo.
