3D Printing and Health.

         3D printing is a process to make a three dimensional object by printing it.  The process consists of laying down successive layers until the complete object is created - or printed.  Particles of plastic, metal, ceramic or glass powders are fused by laser into the desired shape.   Fascinating as 3D printing is for a huge variety of engineering and artistic endeavors, none in my opinion matches its potential for use in medicine and healthcare.
       Tissue printing is likely to be the most exciting use of  3D printing in the foreseeable future.

           In 2012  a baby was born with a rare condition called tracheobronchomalacia: the tissue of one portion of his airway was so weak that it persistently collapsed. This made breathing very difficult, and it regularly blocked vital blood vessels nearby, including the aorta, triggering cardiac and pulmonary arrest. The infant was placed on a ventilator, while the medical team set about figuring out what to do. The area of weak tissue would somehow need to be repaired or replaced—a major and dangerous operation in so small a patient.  The medical team constructed a replacement splint that would eventually dissolve using 3D printing. In May of 2013, in The New England Journal of Medicine, the researchers reported that the boy was thriving and that “no unforeseen problems related to the splint have arisen.       
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         Surgeons in Wales used a 3-D printer to reconstruct the facial bones of a twenty-nine-year-old man named Stephen Power, who fractured his left cheekbone, eye sockets, upper jaw, and skull in a motorcycle accident. The medical team scanned Power’s skull and, based on the unbroken bones, determined what his full facial structure should be. They then printed a replica in titanium and successfully implanted it.
        
        3D printing has been aiding doctors prepare for numerous surgeries by providing highly-detailed, patient specific models to better inform surgeons and practice before entering the operating room.
Artificial tissue has always lacked a key ingredient: blood vessels. A new 3-D printing technique seems poised to change that.
           

The range of uses for three-dimensional printers is increasing all the time, but now scientists are developing 3D "bioprinters" that will be able to print out skin, cartilage, bone, and other body parts.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2011-02-3d-bio-printers-skin-body.html#jCp

         The exVive3D Liver Model is not big enough to be considered an organ, but works in the same way that a real liver might and lives for up to 40 days or longer, making it ideal for testing the toxicity of new medications on human liver tissue.  Organovo points out that “Since 2007, 16 drugs have been withdrawn from the market due to safety issues. It costs more than $1 billion and takes more than 12 years to bring a drug to market.” Current 2D liver assays can’t provide a realistic environment for testing purposes and die in only a few days.  In their retrospective study, however, Roche and Organovo found that only the exVive was able to identify a formerly FDA-approved drug, later removed from the market, as toxic.
        Organovo CEO, Keith Murphy, said of the new product, “Pharma companies can use our bioprinted liver tissue to weed out toxic drugs early in drug development rather than after they have failed expensive clinical trials.”  One day, such products could, in addition to improving drug safety, bypass the need for animal testing in medicine research as well.
         
          Prosthetics. Many prosthetics have been modeled using 3D printing to custom make parts that are extremely difficult to fit and manufacture by less precise methods.   

           Many of these processes  are well demonstrated in youtube video clips.  Well worth viewing to see what is going on in this cutting edge area of medicine.