Bioresorbable Airway Splint

A two-month-old baby has saved his life upon being implanted with a splint in the trachea in a hospital in Michigan (USA), which was reproduced in a 3D printer, as published today in The New England Journal of Medicine.

The newborn suffered constant attacks caused by a syndrom called tracheobronchomalacia, which prevents oxygen from reaching the lungs due to a problem in the trachea problem, as diagnosed by doctors who have published the study. In view of the situation, doctors decided to print a kind of splint, which reproduced the tracheal tube based on a tomographic image of the child's airway.

The 3D reproduction is made with a material called polycaprolactone, bioabsorbable by the human body in three years, so the patient doesn't need another surgery to have the implant removed. The implant was reproduced on the printer in less than a day.

According to doctors, when the implant is removed naturally, the child's lungs and airways will be developed enough to stay open by themselves. After inserting the tube, doctors kept the baby on life support for 21 days, after which the baby was allowed to leave the hospital. One year after implantation, there have been no rejection or any problem with breathing.

This case demonstrates, doctors conclude in the study, that the combination of high resolution images plus the computer design and biomaterials for 3D printing can facilitate the creation of precise anatomical implants. The study has been signed by Scott Hollister and Richard Ohye from the University of Michigan, and Marc Nelson from Akron Children's Hospital.

The three-dimensional printers are making headway in medicine, but for now the applications are very limited. Initially, they were used to design conventional solid materials intended to design personalised implant prosthesis. One of the benefits is the ability to create custom models at lower prices than conventional industrial processes. The next step, as the case published today in the New England Journal of Medicine, is to design objects with a biological material such as the biodegradable polymer employed in the intervention to reproduce the trachea fragment that the patient was missing.

The ability to create these structures combined with the manipulation of stem cells could lead in the future to the creation of artificial organs. At least, scientist are working in this direction. A biological mold would be the basis to provide a three-dimensional structure to the organ. The outer casing would be scattered on cells which would colonize the structure resulting in specialized cells of the organ concerned (cardiomyocytes in the case of the heart, hepatomiocitos for the liver...).

This possibility remains part of science fiction. What is beginning to be a reality is a new generation of 3D printers that generates human tissue. The company Organovo announced last April at the Experimental Biology Conference in Boston an equipment capable of producing tiny liver tissue samples (about 20 cell layers thick). This printer uses biological ink which in this case is made of three types of cells: hepatocytes, stellate cells and cells from the walls of blood vessels, obtained from waste coming from transplants and surgical interventions. Currently, the main use of these miniature livers is to test the effectiveness and impact of new drugs, but it may be the first step in a future technology able to print of organs for transplantation.

http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc1206319

Rex, the bionic man

Technology is turning into reality many of the utopias of science fiction and shortens time between what writers imagine and what scientists can do. The latest example is Rex, the first fully bionic man, which apparently has much in common with Steve Austin, the artificial man who starred the seventies television series called The Man of The Six Million. 

The bionic man is being built from $1,000,000 of limbs and organs by leading UK roboticists Richard Walker and Matthew Godden. All his vital organs were built in a laboratory and it is considered to be the most complete bionic man achieved by science so far.

This bionic man, on display in the Science Museum in London, has also synthetic blood and robotic limbs. With a face that resembles humanity, Rex incorporates some of the latest advances in prosthetic technology: - A prosthetic foot and ankle developed by Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Hugh Herr), - A SynCardia Systems artificial heart - A bionic ear from Macquaire University in Sydney - An eye made of a camera mounted in Rex's glasses and an artificial kideny from University of California - An artificial trachea, first received by a cancer sufferer in 2011, from Royal Free Hospital, London - A spleen from Yale, Connecticut. - An artificial pancreas from De Montfort University, Leicester One of the experts who participated in its construction, Richard Walker, told the BBC that the result of the work is "very significant", since it has allowed to know "how close are prosthetic technology to rebuild the whole human body." "There are some vital organs missing, like the stomach, but 60 to 70 percent of a human has effectively been rebuilt" said Walker. Bertolt Meyer, one of the creators of Rex who was born without a right hand and wears a bionic prosthesis, said that "the great promise of technology is that it can wipe out disabilities." 

However, technology developers claim that not all technology is useful for replacing body parts. For example, hands can not move without bionic human muscle and brain signals. “What we are beginning to achieve is building prostheses which look like human body parts, but we are a long way away from making ones which relay sensory information the way the human body does.” Once medical science improves, as it inevitably will, Meyer says the next step will be tackling the sticky ethical issues which will arise. “Should I be allowed to cut off my real hand and replace it with something, does that give me an unfair advantage over people who cannot afford this?” asks Meyer. “I’m not saying that is going to happen but these are questions that should be on the table before that technology becomes available.”. 

http://www.euronews.com/2013/02/12/meet-rex-the-world-s-first-real-bionic-man/