2023-06-17 19:00:00
To manufacture prostheses, relief printing has become essential. That of living tissue is progressing.
A skull, a vertebra, a dental implant… “3D printing makes it possible to produce mass-produced parts at a lower cost, but also custom-made parts, conforming to the patient’s anatomy”, underlines Jean-Christophe Fricain, director of ART BioPrint in Bordeaux (Gironde). Printing custom-made titanium or ceramic hip or knee prostheses has become commonplace. Last August, a titanium jaw was grafted to a patient. And in 2014, doctors in the Netherlands replaced the skull of a 22-year-old patient, whose thickening bones were compressing her brain, with a plexiglass model.
3D printing on living tissue
For fifteen years, scientists have been applying this technique to living tissueprinted by a laser or inkjet machine, with, as ink, a solution of cells. But many fantasies surround these techniques. “It is currently not possible toprint functional organs, insists Jean-Christophe Fricain. In living tissue, there is a network of blood vessels of varying diameters and with different properties. It’s difficult to reproduce technically.” Bio-printing has proven itself for non-vascularized tissues, such as cartilage or skin – for the latter, a clinical trial is underway in Marseille to implant it in patients. “The advantage over a transplant is that it is obtained quickly, from a very small sample of the patient’s skin”, notes Jean-Christophe Fricain. Printing is mainly used to make clusters of cells to test drugs, or avatars of tumors to observe how cells multiply there.
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#Organs #repaired #prostheses #printing