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posted by martyb on Friday February 12 2016, @12:25AM   Printer-friendly
from the this-is-only-a-test dept.

A team led by engineers at the University of California, San Diego has 3D-printed a tissue that closely mimics the human liver's sophisticated structure and function. The new model could be used for patient-specific drug screening and disease modeling. The work was published the week of Feb. 8 in the online early edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Researchers said the advance could help pharmaceutical companies save time and money when developing new drugs.

"It typically takes about 12 years and $1.8 billion to produce one FDA-approved drug," said Shaochen Chen, NanoEngineering professor at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering. "That's because over 90 percent of drugs don't pass animal tests or human clinical trials. We've made a tool that pharmaceutical companies could use to do pilot studies on their new drugs, and they won't have to wait until animal or human trials to test a drug's safety and efficacy on patients. This would let them focus on the most promising drug candidates earlier on in the process."

A Deterministically Patterned Biomimetic Human iPSC-derived Hepatic Model via Rapid 3D Bioprinting (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1524510113)


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  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 12 2016, @01:38AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 12 2016, @01:38AM (#303049)

    Another step towards a bionic liver.

    I'm sure I'll need one in another 20 years.

    • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday February 12 2016, @08:12PM

      by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Friday February 12 2016, @08:12PM (#303386) Journal

      The question is "How big a step?". It me it seems like a large advance, but I'm quite unfamiliar with the project. I know that it only seems that a couple of years ago they were limited to single sheet "organs".

      Stiil, livers are, relatively, easy. Livers normally regrow if damaged. Kidneys, OTOH, are a lot more difficult.

      And what to you do if your cells become senescent? Senile cells appear to be one of the big causes of aging, but stem cells also seem to have limited reproductive capability.. (I'm sort of guessing at that last bit, but studies of centenarians seem [to me] to show most of their stem cells are gone.)

      So there's lots of work ahead, but this does look like a major step.

      --
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    • (Score: 2) by davester666 on Saturday February 13 2016, @09:34AM

      by davester666 (155) on Saturday February 13 2016, @09:34AM (#303612)

      20 years? you some friggin' teetotaler?

      Grow a pair and start drinking like you mean it.

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by aristarchus on Friday February 12 2016, @06:55AM

    by aristarchus (2645) on Friday February 12 2016, @06:55AM (#303113) Journal

    This post is only here to boost the comment count for this fine Article. If only more Soylentils could comment on submissions about bio-3D printing, we might be able to actually do some of it. It's all about the base, no tribles, all about the base, liver cells! Yeah it's all about the base, I mean substrate! It's all about the base. Metabolism. All the right stuff in all the right places!

    • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday February 12 2016, @03:08PM

      by Phoenix666 (552) on Friday February 12 2016, @03:08PM (#303228) Journal

      I'm waiting for the endless accolades from users like wonkey_monkey who pan lighter fare. You know them, the ones who are always stomping off because $TOPIC is too sensationalist or silly to warrant spending their $VERY_VALUABLE_TIME reading Soylent? Surely they'll be along any minute to laud the article and say how they're sure glad they read Soylent and how grateful they are to all the submitters, editors, and coders who volunteer their time to bring it to them.

      --
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