Printing New Tissue

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As a followup to the last item on tissue engineering, Betterhumans reports on progress in using printing technologies to create structure in tissue. This appears to be mostly still flat printing with some tweaks, but three-dimensional printing machines (fabricators) are becoming more common. They are used to produce models in a number of industries, and I imagine they could also be adapted for bioengineering. From the article: "A large part of the body is made of tubes. We can now make 3D hollow biological tubes and organ modules, which potentially could be used as grafts."

Link: http://www.betterhumans.com/News/news.aspx?articleID=2004-02-16-3