PRINT A NEW SET OF ORGANS

Forget guns and shoes: 3D printing will soon be tasked with crafting organs, thanks to Vancouver’s Aspect Biosystems. Under its catchy slogan “Human Tissues on Demand,” the UBC biotechnology start-up company has already replicated living human tissue through custom-built 3D printers. It uses a microfluidic chip to generate a thin gel fibre—loaded with living cells—which is then stacked into a 3D structure layer by layer and incubated for several weeks to develop into tissue, explains Tamer Mohamed, Aspect’s cofounder. Mohamed adds of the technology currently used for drug testing, “The goal is to create replacement tissue for surgical implantation.” And possibly a world without donors, to boot.—