Straight to the heart: Makato Nakamura with the 3-D inkjet bioprinter.
Credit: AFP
The printer can adjust where to drop cells in the order of one-thousandth of a millimetre and produce a tube at a speed of three centimetres (1.2 inches) per two minutes.
Nakamura's motivation is simple: if there are not enough organs for the people who need them, then scientists should make them.
Treating children with heart problems day and night as a paediatrician, he realised there are children who do not respond to conventional treatment or whose condition is too serious to treat.
"I just had to watch them die"
"I just had to watch them die," he said. "Clinical doctors can't give them treatment that isn't in textbooks. I clung to the hope that medicine will make progress and save more lives in the future."
Then 36, Nakamura thought he "shouldn't just wait" and left a decade of clinical work to be a researcher, in hopes of contributing to medical progress.
Now 49, he is married to a former nurse and has five children.
Nakamura dismisses the idea of printing brains or trying to create new life. "I'm not envisioning making superhuman cyborgs. There are simply lives that could be saved if there are organs," he said.
He spent years researching artificial hearts but mechanical organs are not yet reasonable alternatives for donor organs. Problems include their inability to generate energy by themselves, make hormones or fight infection.
Bioprinting with stem cells
One day Nakamura found that droplets from inkjet printers were about the same size as human cells, which are as small as 10 micrometres in diameter each, or one-100th of a millimetre. He bought a home-use Seiko Epson printer in 2002 and tried to eject cells with it. But the inkjet nozzle got clogged.
He rang up the company's customer service, telling the operator that he wanted to print cells, an idea she politely turned down. Nakamura did not give up and eventually reached an Epson official who showed interest and agreed to give him technical support.
In 2003, Nakamura confirmed that cells survived even after the printing process, becoming one of the first researchers in the world to unveil a 3-D structure with real living cells using inkjet technology.
To prevent the droplets from drying out and to help cells form a 3-D structure, Nakamura puts cells in alginate sodium and jets them into a calcium-chloride solution.
In the future, Nakamura also said the technology could pave the way for bioprinting with stem cells – which could go into building healthy new organs. "I really don't know what the future possibilities are, but this technology will be needed in the future to find where to position stem cells," he said.
