Printing up blood vessels using a 3D printer

Every day it seems we are hearing about some incredible scientific discovery using cutting edge technology and nothing right now is more cutting edge that 3D printing. However it gets even more incredible when when you find out that what is being printed up is human blood vessels.

It seems that scientists at the German Fraunhofer Institute have been able to construct artificial blood vessels with the help of an advanced 3D printing technique. Using a 3D ink-jet printer they constructed the blood vessels by layering special inks.

However existing 3D printing systems aren’t quite advanced enough to create the complex structure of blood vessels nor give them the necessary elasticity and that is where a process called two-proton polymerization comes into play.

Brief but intensive laser impulses impact the material and stimulate the molecules in a very small focus point so that crosslinking of the molecules occurs. The material becomes an elastic solid, due to the properties of the precursor molecules that have been adjusted by the chemists in the project team. In this way highly precise, elastic structures are built according to a 3-dimensional building plan.

via Fraunhofer Institute

This process is still in the research stage but results so far are encouraging and the technology used here can be used in creating more complex tissues.