No More Waking Up in a Bathtub Full of Ice

How could 3D printers eliminate the need for organ donors? What are the benefits of printing human tissue? What progress has been made so far? Join Jonathan, Lauren and Joe as they explore the future of printed organs.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking. Hi there everyone, Welcome to Forward Thinking. I
am host number one Jonathan Strickland, and with me our
hosts two and three introduce yourselves. Hi, I'm Lauren Vocalbam.

(00:20):
Hi am Joe McCormick. And what are we talking about today? Joe, Well,
we're gonna be talking about three D printing. And to
start off a little bit, Uh, three D printing is
basically exactly what it sounds like. The way you print
a document today is you get an image of what
that document would look like on your computer and that's
digitally rendered. It's sent to the printer, and then the

(00:43):
printer creates that in the real world with ink on
a page. Now, of course that's basically for all intensive
purposes two dimensional. Extend that another dimension. Now you have
a machine that takes a digital model and it creates
a three dimensional object. So this is what we would

(01:03):
call additive manufacturing. So you can take any kind of
multiple material like plastic or glass or metal, and you
can create an object with a printer that lays on
tiny layers, one little bit at a time to create
any object. You can design in a digital way. Cool. Yeah,

(01:24):
and this is used in a lot of different fields,
including in manufacturing. A lot of prototypes are made this
way because, uh, you know prototypes. Traditionally, the way that
people would make a prototype model of a product would
be to take some sort of material and carve away
at it until you reach whatever you know your destination
product is. Hence additive manufacturing instead of subtractive exactly. Yeah, yeah, exactly,

(01:48):
because you're subtracting material to get to what you want.
But with three D printing, you're you're just adding what
is needed, so there's there's not really you don't have
that problem of waste like you would if you were
carving or melting stuff way. So here's an even cooler
thing that we could do with three D printing. Though
of course you can make a chess piece or an
action figure. Those are both on my list, right, What

(02:11):
if you could make a kidney or a liver so like,
and you're talking not for dinner, but for actual medical
purposes in an organ that works. That that is phenomenal
and there are people who are working on that. Yeah,
it's actually hypothetically not all that very far off. Researchers
have just recently created the first the first live human

(02:34):
well they're they're working towards the first live human tissue.
They've created a three D printer that instead of using
ink or plastic or or whatever else you would put
in a printer, it deals out these droplets of embryonic
human stem cells um in a nutrient soup. And it
does this so gently and so precisely that the cells
remain living and remain capable of developing two different cell types.

(02:54):
So what you could do is, by using these stem
cells and using the appropriate type of tissue, you could
print them in such a formation as to create an organ.
I mean, that's that's kind of like the the goal
we're talking about the end right now. They're basically just
just printing little layers of soup and saying the soup
could become something someday. Layers of soup. That's that sounds

(03:18):
like a great name for a band, not a Frank's
Apple album, It might very well be. You know, kids,
ask your parents the yeah, this is this is some
really cool applications here. Well, yeah, they already think they
can do some really amazing things with this. Just one
example is, um imagine, there's a burn victim who has

(03:38):
lots of cellular damage all over the surface of the body. Um. Now,
in some cases, if the burns are small enough, you
could get skin grafts that helped cover up the burned areas.
But imagine if there are a lot of burns that
there's you know, you can't cover it with skin grafts. Well,
you could print with a with a medical three D printer,

(03:58):
you could print a layer of cells to go over
the burned areas that could help help the wound heal
faster and help prevent infection and contend disease. Yeah, and
that's incredibly important with burns. Infection is one of those
things that can make a serious condition a critical condition. Uh.
And that's true for any major injury. And in fact,

(04:19):
I was reading about potential Actually I wasn't reading. I
was watching. There was a great video a TED talk
by Anthony Atala and this dates back to two thousand
eleven when he was talking about a potential new technology
that what it would do is scan someone who has
suffered a wound and then after scanning the wound would

(04:40):
immediately start to print repairs to the body. So that
could be tissue everything from from muscle tissue to ligaments,
to bone, to even to skin, so that it would
be a multi pass system. The first pass would be
the scan, the next pass would be printing, and it
would probably scan and print, scan and print, and you
would he wounds incredibly rapidly, not quite so fast as

(05:03):
in the series that we all love, Star Trek. It's
not quite a trick quarter yet, not not yet, but
it's it's that's a phenomenal idea. And and beyond that,
there's the idea of just printing out a replacement organ
based upon the patient's cells, so that the organ has
a high does not have as higher risk of being

(05:25):
rejected by the body. So that's something we all know about.
You know, you in order to get a transplant these days,
you have to have an organ donor, and that donor
has to be compatible with the patient. By printing, you
could print out an organ that's already compatible with the patient,
and that reduces the chance the body will reject the organ.
You're never going to reduce that chance to zero, at

(05:47):
least not based on our understanding of how the human
body works right now, but you could definitely impact it.
And all of this is pretty far off. I mean,
like I said, they're right now using embryonic human stem cells.
If we could move into using peripotent stem cells from
made from adult sure adult stem cells. Where it's the
issue here is that embryonic stem cells have the opportunity

(06:10):
to develop into lots of different kinds of tissue. Adults
stem cells tend to be more already a little specialized
that they're limited in what kind of tissues they can
become based upon our most of our applications right now,
but this would give us many more options right when
we're when we need to pronoup material. Also, I should

(06:31):
point out that three D printers can work in biomedical materials,
not just actual human tissue. They've been practicing with using
different artificial human tissue right that can that can be
printed out and then using a very focused laser zapped
into into an appropriate form to form for example, of
blood vessel. And this this is incredible stuff. It's also

(06:53):
very tricky because there are only so many materials that
you can introduce to a human system without the risk
of action or rejection. But one application outside the human body,
of course, would be research. Sure, Yeah, if you could
manufacture organs that you could do research on without endangering
actual human tissue that's attached to somebody or a cute, fuzzy,

(07:14):
funny rabbit or yeah, yeah you could. You're having to
take it from yeah yeah. I think about think about
pharmaceutical tests where grant. This raises up a lot of
ethical questions. You know, I'm sure people would ask is
it ethical to create artificial you're creating real organs using
this three D printing technique. Actually, if you used any
technique to do this, but three D printing is the

(07:35):
one we're concentrating on. Um if you were to create
those organs, is it ethical to be able to do
these sort of tests? From my perspective, I I tend
to think yes. I think that's far more ethical than
having to ask for a volunteer population or to take
animals which have no ability to consent to the sort
of test testing, and to think like, Okay, well we've developed,

(07:56):
for instance, we've developed a new drug that's meant to
fight off a Shuler disease, but we don't know how
it would affect healthy tissue. This would be a way
of being able to do those tests in a manner
that's not going to put at risk the life of
an actual person, so it could be incredibly effective. Also,
I think it's important to remember that for us to

(08:18):
reach that amazing future where we have the six million
dollar man, uh, not all of those parts need to
be robotic in nature. We can create bigger, faster, stronger
organs because we'll have the technology. No way, I just
want a stomach that lets me eat ghost peppers without
feeling badly afterwards, because I loves the spicy. But you know, hey,

(08:42):
the show is not all about how does Jonathan take
future technologies and bend them to his own will? No,
it kind of is really okay alright, so no, I
definitely want that. But seriously though that the the potential
benefits here are phenomenal. It means that we could get
to a point where there won't be a place for

(09:04):
you to put on your driver's license that you're an
organ donor because it's not necessary, which would be a
wonderful world to live in where people who have a
desperate need for an organ transplant aren't in a waiting
game where they have no idea when, if ever they
will receive an oregan right and hopefully eliminate an organ
black market all of that kind of scary territory. Sure. Yeah,

(09:27):
I mean if we're talking about something that is widely
distributed in particular, then you have eliminated an entire uh
possible black market. You know, you've reduced the risk of
of people being forcibly uh submitted to organ transplants. For
the TV will have no more jokes about bathtubs. Full

(09:50):
advice that would be do we want to live in
that world where we don't have that joke? That's okay
because we have other jokes like aren't you glad you
didn't turn on the light? Those police procedural There's also
the you know, the the hook that's hanging from the
door handle. There are plenty of other urban legends that
we can really concentrate. True, the next generation of prosthetics
could make that story history too, that's true. Well, you

(10:12):
know what, I'm confident that our futuristic world will generate
all new urban legends for us to to really focus on.
You know, but yeah, you'll have the I don't know
what the robot hanging off the exactly he has the
robotic arm and thinking that law, the crazed robot that
roams the hills. Oh man, I look forward to telling

(10:34):
that urban legend around a digital campfires one day. But yeah, yeah,
this is getting back to the three D printing in
the human tissue to get a little more serious. This
is something that I am really genuinely excited about. It's
this thought of of being able to to really improve
the health conditions of people who desperately need it. And

(10:55):
of course we're all starting to live longer. I mean
our our our health has improved over time so that
our lifespans have extended quite a bit, and that means
that there are more opportunities for things to fail. So
more and more of us are going to be in
an experience where something like this might be necessary. So
to see this technology starting to blossom today and know

(11:17):
that within you know, a generation or two, it may
be sophisticated enough where an Oregon donor is something that
just you you've only heard about in you know, history
text history textbooks or visiting me in the old folks
home when I sit there and talk about the the
old days when you had to wait for a donor. Um.
So I'm I'm genuinely excited about this and I can't

(11:39):
wait to see how it continues. And uh, and so
that wraps up our discussion here on three D printing
and human tissue. We've got so much more to say, guys,
make sure you visit our website. It's forward thinking dot Com,
that's f w thinking dot Com. We take these topics
and we really break them down in video format, in
the audio podcast and blog posts, and we really want

(12:03):
to hear from you and what you are interested in
and the sort of things that gets you excited about
the future, because this really needs to be a conversation.
So make sure you join us and we will talk
to you again really soon. We're more on this topic
and the future of technology. Visit forward thinking dot Com

(12:25):
brought to you by Toyota. Let's go Places.