

Print Thyself: How 3-D Printing Is Changing Medicine - sasvari
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/11/24/print-thyself

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Cogito
The most interesting technique I hadn't heard of before (there were a couple!)
was using a material that, when cooled, turns into a liquid. It is named
Pluronic ink, but they refer to it as 'fugitive ink'.

This enables them to print a structure that incorporates this material, cool
the whole thing down, and suck out the liquid.

They use this technique to lay down 3d channels in printed bio-materials,
which they then infuse with endothelial cells to create blood vessels.
Amazing!

 _The other ink dispensers would take their turn, laying down a lattice of
collagen and fibroblasts that would solidify around the network of fugitive
ink, encasing it in tan-colored living tissue. To drain the fugitive ink,
Kolesky would place the tissue on a chilled stone cube; this would cause the
ink to change from a gel to a liquid, after which he could then extract it
with a small suction device. The end result would be a block of living tissue
suffused with intricate vessels capable of carrying nutrients to the cells
within._

 _The last step was to me the most remarkable. Once the vessels were empty,
Kolesky would take a suspension of endothelial cells—the cells that line the
insides of blood vessels—and inject it into the vessel network. The cells
would settle in and multiply to line the insides of the channels, effectively
turning the channels into blood vessels. And then the cells would spread—they
would begin to branch off the existing vessels and form new ones. In effect,
Lewis and her team have created an environment that the cells consider home—it
is far more natural to them than a petri dish or the inorganic scaffolds that
had previously played host to cultured tissues._

~~~
steve19
Support material is frequently used by the hobbyist 3D printing community.

There are a number of different plastics, PVA is one example, that dissolve in
warm water (others dissolve in an alkaline solution) but will adhere to ABS or
PLA plastic when warm.

The printer will have two different extruders, one for the main material and
one for the support. Entire closed gear boxes, with all the gears pre-
installed can be printed in a single print using this method. Its pretty
amazing stuff:

[http://www.3ders.org/articles/20120128-dissolvable-
support-m...](http://www.3ders.org/articles/20120128-dissolvable-support-
material-used-for-3d-printing-gearbox-and-hilbert-cube.html)

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Retric
I find this technology extremely cool and I have little doubt that its
adoption should be widespread.

However, while reading this I started wondering if the drop in infant
mortality is going to reduce our genetic fitness over time and require ever
more complex and invasive surgery. Oddly enough I think directly altering DNA
is probably the best long term solution to avoiding such dependence which I
find kind of uplifting. It's sort of the antithesis of the 'bleak' picture
painted by most sci-fi dealing with genetic modifications.

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doctoboggan
I work at the Harvard lab mentioned in this article, and I wrote the software
that was used to generate the header image.

3D printers are controlled in a language called GCode (also used for CNC
mills). I wrote a GUI that allows the end user to draw any path with a tablet
(or mouse) and then have that converted to GCode. This enabled the researchers
to print more complex objects, as they previously had to write their GCode by
hand.

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aswanson
Seems that at least from an electrical and software standpoint that this type
of printing should be fairly simple. Where is the cost justification for these
devices?

