The plastic 3-D printing machine has been around for a few years and man, is that cool. It can replicate most any mechanical system and it will function, too. Now, researchers at Organovo are taking things one step further, promising to be able to print entire organs for transplant patients. That technology would certainly be the jewel in the crown of the 3-D printing industry, but is Organovo living up to the hype? Will this company keep stride with the overactive imagination? Even if Organovo fails to deliver, there are still other promising methods for growing organs in the lab.

Well, not quite. Although the website’s generic mission statement alludes to being able to print whole organs, like hearts or kidneys, that technology is quite a long way off. The research published by this federally funded project founded by Dr. Gabor Forgacs, a researcher at the University of Missouri, indicates that the company is first working on printing fully functioning blood vessels and arteries.

Organovo claims that printing blood vessels from the patient’s own cells will enable a transplant, like a bypass surgery, to work better. There is little to no chance of the patient rejecting the cells, as they are autologous. Another advantage of the bioprinting system is that there is no need for plastic scaffolding, which is said to cause inflammation and reduce the effectiveness of the transplant.

The idea behind the printing system is that the organ is printed layer by layer. A printer, using cell globules as ink, places them down onto a bio-degradable sheet of paper, where the cells naturally fuse together to create a small piece of the organ. A piece of bio-paper is put between each layer of the organ and, after all of the cells in the same layer are fused, the paper disintegrates and allows the different layers to fuse to each other. Eventually, after many layers, the blood vessel will materialize and be fully functional. Take a look at the video for a better explanation and some pretty 3-D computer model rendering:

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