Bioprinting of live cells is within sight for 3D printing.

VIDEO 5 min. In January, 2013, bioprinting of human body parts had not been fully realized, but was under development. 3D printers were commonly used for projects involving plastic materials, such as making gun parts.

Surgeons can model body parts to prepare for surgery.

By 2015, bioprinting, although still a ways off as to transplants, has been utilized to model tissue, to allow surgeons a better understanding of operations about to be undertaken.

A two-year-old girl born with a hole in her heart had a life-saving operation in London last month thanks to a 3D printer. Perhaps equally astounding is that she’s not the first.

Mina Khan was born with a hole in the wall between two chambers of her heart, a condition that left her exhausted and unable to gain weight or even grow hair. The deformity was so severe doctors said it likely couldn’t be repaired – but by creating an exact 3D replica of her heart using MRI and computerized tomography scans, surgeons at St. Thomas’ Hospital in London were able to design a bespoke patch, practice and perfect how to stitch it into place, and ultimately perform the surgery successfully on the girl’s actual heart.

“The 3D printing meant we could create a model of her heart and then see the inside of it with a replica of the hole as it looked when the heart was pumping,” Professor David Anderson, who led the operating team, recently told the Sunday Times. This meant that even though Mina had a “very complex” hole in her heart that posed a “huge intellectual challenge,” the team was able to enter the operating room with a “much better idea of what we would find.”

Mina isn’t the first tiny tot to benefit from these “practice” organs fashioned from a 3D printer. Just last year in New York, surgeons performed a similar surgery on a 2-week-old infant, whose congenital heart defect left several holes in his heart.

“It made a huge difference because the baby went from needing 3 or 4 surgeries to needing just one,” the head surgeon said at the time.

To read the rest of this article, and see a video of how bioprinted cells can create an environment for study of disease, visit the source article.

To see some uses of 3D printing by NASA, visit the next page.