How often do you think about that little notation on your driver’s license that offers your consent to donate your organs in the event of your death? Perhaps you never think of it, but plenty of researchers around the world do, and the reality is that the two biggest challenges of organ transplant surgery are access to the organs themselves and the possibility of rejection by the recipient’s body.

But what if we lived in a world where organs could be created on demand? Where patients didn’t have to cling desperately to life while waiting for an available organ donation? Where people didn’t die waiting?

That world is no longer the stuff of science fiction.

Within the next two years, researchers around the globe will have the opportunity to explore the possibilities for creating needed human tissue through the use of a 3-D bio-printer developed by Melbourne, Australia-based Invetech and San Diego-based Organovo Inc.

The printers cost about $200,000 a pop, but their potential to save lives is priceless. Essentially, the printers, with the help of research scientists, may one day allow for the building of human organs using a few starter cells and 3-D scaffolding.

“Scientists and engineers can use the 3-D bio-printers to enable placing cells of almost any type into a desired pattern in 3-D,” says Organovo’s CEO Keith Murphy. “Researchers can place liver cells on a pre-formed scaffold, support kidney cells with a co-printed scaffold, or form adjacent layers of epithelial and stromal soft tissue that grow into a mature tooth.”

Mind boggling? Yes. Impossible? No.

“Within my lifetime, we’ll be able to replicate some manner of solid organs,” says David Leeser, M.D., transplant surgeon at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center.

With the technology of a bio-printer, it’s possible scientists will be able to use progenitor cells from a patient to create a replacement organ, thus eliminating the issue of rejection by the patient’s immune system.

The challenge, says Leeser, is figuring out how to make cells grow into certain organs. “What are the signals in fetal development that lead to the creation of organs?” he asks. “Sooner or later, it’s in the realm of possibility that we can manufacture human organs.”

But Leeser believes we’re still decades away from seeing the production of human organs for transplant on a scale that would impact patients waiting for organ replacement.

“The complexity involved is huge,” Leeser says. “For example, cells organize into blood vessels because there’s a heart there that starts pumping. To replicate those processes in a lab is not simple.”

But the work is beginning. Organovo expects scientists to start printing blood vessels for research purposes in the near future but does not anticipate that process entering the process of approval for therapeutic use for at least three to five years.

Murphy says the long-term goal is “to have tissues on demand.”

How soon is anybody’s guess, but organ donation and transplant may one day be a medical marvel of the past.

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