Assignment 16 - 3D printing organs - andrei zivkovic

So as most of you know I broke my leg last summer and was on crutches for a while and i did this by falling off a bike. I fractured my femoral neck and has to get surgery and now I have 4 screws in my leg long story short I basically broke my hip because I don't have the basic skills to ride a bike. But anyways my doctor told me that in the next 7-8 years there is always a chance that the blood supply in my hip could stop and i would have to get surgery again, This uncertainty has always given me a bit of anxiety and whenever I go to get my leg looked at I'm always worried that soemthings wrong with it again. When it comes to people getting any medical procedure specifically in this case organ transplants there's always an uncertainty that occurs among people but this can be diminished through the process of 3D printing organs for transplants which also increases the amount of transplants that can be done among patients. 

“Modern medicine has made major advances in treatment for organ failure and organ related diseases, but an organ’s function is very complex and hard to duplicate.” “So although healthcare has taken progressive steps, those steps can only help so much before even more problems arise.” Today with all the new technology in the medical field an advancement is occurring that will revolutionize the medical field by combining the innovation of mechanical engineering and bioengineering. 3D printing organs is a proposal that could end up replacing the process of organ donations and speed up the process overall. 

“Researchers have developed techniques to produce artificial structures via printing to replace damaged or obsolete parts of the body, such as prosthetics and kidneys. The beginning of printing in medicine started with simple structures of the body: arteries, blood vessels, skin, muscles, etc. The process by which these parts are made involves taking the cells of the patient receiving the transplant, printing a biodegradable mold, then coating the mold in the duplicated cells, and last incubating the structure allowing the cells to develop around the mold and which eventually “dissolves” and only the biological structure from the mold remains. Because these biological structures are completely developed out of the patients’ cells, there is no threat of rejection and virtually fully functional.”

 The reason that this option is proposed can be attributed to the problems that occur among organ donations and transplants. A drawback that comes with organ donations is that it can lead to medical problems and it is usually due to medicines needed to suppress the immune system so it doesn't fight the donor organ. Some of these medical problems being diabetes, depression, high blood pressure etc. There can also be risks for the donor some of those include “reactions to anesthesia, blood clots, the need for blood transfusion, post operative infections and surgical complications.” 

A major issue facing the healthcare community deals with patients on the transplant list having to wait a long time to receive an organ. For them to receive an organ one must become available through the death of someone else and there are still risks of the organs being rejected by the body. In a Ted Talk done by Anthony Atala  He covers the issue of how as we live longer our organs tend to fail and how there are not enough organs to go around for transplants and a solution to this is the start of 3D printing organs. And how in the last 10 years the number of patients needing transplants nearly doubled and has been steadily increasing. 

“However, 3D printing offers a solution to this problem: through printing the organs. A major success story that provides light in the future of printing is the development of a functional kidney at Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine by Dr. Anthony Atala in 2002. The produced kidney was given to Dr. Atala’s patient, Luke Massella, who suffered from complete kidney failure. Luke was destined to be on dialysis for the rest of his life until receiving the artificial kidney. Now, Luke has grown up to live a happy life ever since the procedure.”

Knowing that there is a solution that can offer less implications can help ease people who have to go through this process . Knowing that something could go wrong with my leg at any time always freaked me out but for people that have to go through the process of getting transplants knowing that there is now an option that can benefit them better in the long run helps diminish that sense of anxiety that people have when it comes to the whole process.