In the United States, there are 106,800 men, women and children on the national organ transplant waiting list as of March 8, 2023, according to the Health Resources & Services Administration. However, living donors provide only around 6,000 organs per year on average, and there are about 8,000 deceased donors annually who each provide 3.5 organs on average.
Currently, if one of your important organs stops working or is too damaged, your choices suck: get a transplant, or die. And transplantation means someone has to give up an organ, or has to be dead (and yet still have the needed organ and that in good shape, and a reasonable match for blood type, antibodies, and HLA). 3D printing has spread into the area of printing biological materials. If we can print replacement organs, the donor and donor-match problems go away:
What if doctors could just print a kidney, using cells from the patient, instead of having to find a donor match and hope the patient’s body doesn’t reject the transplanted kidney?
The soonest that could happen is in a decade, thanks to 3D organ bioprinting, said Jennifer Lewis, a professor at Harvard University’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. Organ bioprinting is the use of 3D-printing technologies to assemble multiple cell types, growth factors and biomaterials in a layer-by-layer fashion to produce bioartificial organs that ideally imitate their natural counterparts
https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/10/health/3d-printed-organs-bioprinting-life-itself-wellness-scn/index.html. About 1,500 words.
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