SMART THINKING

Scientific breakthrough brings 3D organs one step closer.

A scientific breakthrough makes 3D printing organs one step closer.

Artificial organs have been used since the 1980s as an alternative to transplants, with the first artificial heart transplant taking place in 1982. Unfortunately due to the complexity of human organs, progress of artificial organ manufacturing has been slow. While organ transplantation is often successful, it is limited by donor shortage, cost, immune system rejection and ethical conflict, making artificial organ manufacturing an important field. For the first time, researchers from the Helmholtz Zentrum München – German Research Center for Environmental Health and the University of Munich have managed to make intact human organs transparent using a detergent called CHAPS. The researchers developed a new laser-scanning microscope that could reveal underlying complex structures of the see-through organs at the cellular level. Together with Professor Bjoern Menze from the Technical University of Munich, they developed algorithms to analyse hundreds of millions of cells to construct organ maps, naming this new technology SHANEL (Smallmicelle-mediated Human orgAN Efficient clearing and Labeling). In the future, these organ maps could be used to engineer large-scale human tissues and organs with emerging 3D-bioprinting technologies. “Detailed knowledge about the cellular structure of human organs brings us an important step closer to creating functional organs artificially on demand,” says Dr. Ali Ertürk from Helmholtz Zentrum München.

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