Blood Vessels From Your Printer to Replace Animal Experimentation

19.09.11 - Researchers have been working at growing tissues and organs in the laboratory for a long time. This research is known as tissue engineering and it enables researchers to build up artificial tissues which have the potential to replace animal experiments.

One stumbling block has been how to provide those tissues with a continuous oxygen supply. Without direct access to an oxygen source, the large tissues cannot be grown or they do not live very long.

Researchers in Germany have developed a procedure that can artifically create human-analogue blood vessels through a techinique similar to printing your family pictures at home.

Using this technique, future researchers could build up completely artificial organs based on a circulation system with blood vessels created in this fashion to supply them with nutrients. This would enable the creation of large-scale 3D cell cultures and artificial organs, as opposed to current small-scale 3D cell cultures.

Although the current technology is not suited for transplantations, the system can be used as a test system to replace animal experiments.

It will take a long time until they will actually be able to implant organs from the laboratory into patients, but the technology can be used now to replace animals in scientific experiments.

Click here for the BBC report on this news

Click here for the Fraunhofer Institute press release

 

Image is © Fraunhofer IGB. A polymer tube, which can become an artificial blood vessel, is flushed with cell medium.

Comments

There are currently no comments on this post

Post a Comment

Your comment will have to be approved by a site administrator before it is shown on the site so please be patient.