Cartilage Cells for the 3D Bio Printer
The natural cartilage in your body is used for the building blocks in rhinoplasty, revision rhinoplasty, saddle nose repair and other nose surgery to help you breathe normally.
(Read more about revision rhinoplasty.)
Those cartilage donations come from the interior of your nose, your ears and from between certain ribs.
Donations from other people won’t work because your body sees that as foreign invaders and attacks. In medicine, when one part of the body is used in another section of the same patient, it’s known as an autologous donation.
Now, a new source is being developed and sits on the plastic surgery horizon.
You may have heard of the new 3-D printers that can reproduce many objects, spare parts and prototypes in plastic, building the object tiny layer by tiny layer.
Researchers are now researching bio artificial 3-D printers to turn out human organs. That day is pretty far off but currently some researchers are using a bio artificial 3-D printer to turn out cow cartilage.
(Read more about a medical advance that is already in use: non-surgical rhinoplasty.)
The first aim of Scripps Clinic researchers in San Diego, California, is to use the high-tech printer to generate exact copies of cartilage for knee replacements patients.
The printer lays down layer upon layer of living cells contained in a liquid or gel. The goal: use a printer in the O.R. to turn out a custom piece of cartilage to replace something that has been been removed or is missing.
Already, one researcher has used a bio artificial printer to produce some cow cartilage and for some human patients undergoing knee replacement surgery.
With some 243,000 nose reshaping procedures done yearly, could human cartilage for nose surgery be next?
We don’t recommend holding your breath or putting off a much needed functional surgery to correct bad breathing. Experts say it could be two decades before a whole organ can be bio printed.
But the same experts say that cartilage could be the low-hanging fruit that puts 3-D bio artificial printing into more widespread use. One reason is that cartilage does not need a lot of nourishment and that makes the biological printing process easier.
Yet another plastic surgery project for women is being conducted at the University of Texas. A researcher has created a way to print fat tissue that could be used for small breast augmentation for women who have had breast lumpectomies. That procedure removes a lump or cancerous material along with some of the surrounding breast tissue.