The Body Printed: How 3-D Printing Could Change the Face of Modern Medicine?And Why That Future Is Still So Far Away

It takes only a few minutes for the NovoGen MMX to print out a chunk of human liver cells. It's a small chunk, only 4-mm wide and 20 cell layers thick, which wouldn't do much good in a human patient. But at a cellular level, this tiny swatch of machine-made flesh has all the essential ingredients of an original organ: tight hexagons of hepatocytes and fatty stellate cells and endothelial cells gathered into nascent capillaries. It produces cholesterol, albumin, and detoxifying P450 enzymes. After it is printed, the ensemble can survive for almost an entire week-nearly triple the endurance of classic two-dimensional (2-D) liver cultures.