Bones by Design, Organs on Demand

The rapidly evolving field of 3-D printing is just out of its infancy, but it’s already having a huge impact on medicine. These printers have CAD-like abilities and can spray almost any material, including biomaterials, through specialized nozzles to build incredibly complex three-dimensional objects.

Imagine diseased, damaged or missing body parts becoming a thing of the past — it’s already happening. Metal jawbones and hips are among the first replacement bones to be made on a 3-D printer. Further, Massachusetts General Hospital researchers have grown an artificial ear from animal tissue and are working on doing the same with human tissue. 
Livers. Kidneys. Bladders. These and more are in various stages of 3-D development, which is huge news to the 18 or so people who die every day — that’s 6,500 annually — in the U.S. alone while waiting for a traditional organ transplant.

Before any medicine can be brought to market, it has to be guaranteed it will not have any harmful effects on the person who takes it. To date health authorities require careful safety assessment, often involving animal models as well. The future, however, shows new ways to make the development of medicines better and faster, moving molecules from the lab directly to the patient.

It's smaller than an iPhone and yet it reflects the entire human organism: the Organs-on-a-Chip technology is a new alternative way to screen drug candidates in a very early stage for efficacy and toxicity. The technology enables researchers to cultivate human cells representing organs under physiological conditions. Multiple organs can be placed on one chip and are interconnected to model the dynamics of a human organism. This is possible because 3D cell culture, microfluids and 3D printing technologies allow the cultivation of cells from patients who, for example, reflect the disease genotype or phenotype. Therefore, the translucent devices provide a window into the tissue structures, functions, and mechanical motions of hearts, lungs, kidneys, arteries, intestines and other organs - in other words, the inner workings of humans.

How will we benefit from the technology in the future?

We along with many companies and universities are continuously looking for new and better models for drug development. That is why we have ongoing collaborations with engineers at the ETH Zurich and the Wyss Institute at Harvard.
Last year we intensified our focus on Organs-on-a-Chip because it offers the opportunity to obtain human-relevant information on a potential drug or active substance very early in research and development. The Organs-on-a-Chip technology provides a sneak view of a newly discovered molecule and its potential effects on humans many years before actually entering the clinic.