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Need a New Organ? Surgeon Anthony Atala Sees a Future Where You Can Simply Print It Out
When you can order a new body part online, you’ll have this doctor to thank
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Anthony Antala
Anthony Antala (Alex Boerner)
By Matthew Shaer
SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE | SUBSCRIBE
DECEMBER 2016
1137061285
In a harshly lit laboratory in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, there sits a machine that is, in many ways, similar to a standard-issue desktop printer. It has ink reservoirs and nozzles, an internal fan to keep it cool, and a set of input jacks that can be used to connect it to a nearby computer. It is subject to the occasional jam. And yet the 800-pound steel and plastic device is unlike anything you’ve ever encountered, because what it prints is alive—millions and millions of living human cells, contained in a viscous gel and woven through delicate biodegradable supports in a quivering simulacrum of human tissue.

FROM THIS STORY
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Preview thumbnail for video 'In Situ Tissue Regeneration: Host Cell Recruitment and Biomaterial Design
In Situ Tissue Regeneration: Host Cell Recruitment and Biomaterial Design

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It took a decade for numerous scientists and engineers to build and refine the Integrated Tissue and Organ Printing System, or ITOP. Ultimately, though, it’s the brainchild of a single man: a tousle-haired 59-year-old doctor named Anthony Atala. Born in Peru, and raised outside of Miami, Atala—today the director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine—has spent the past decade attempting to print living organs.

“For me, it all started back in Boston, in the early 1990s,” recalls the urologic surgeon and biotechnologist. “Because that’s when I really came face to face with the transplant organ shortage.” At the time, Atala was working his first post-medical school gig, as a research fellow at Harvard Medical School. Every week, during his rounds at Boston Children’s Hospital, he met another young patient who had spent months or even years waiting for a replacement organ. Some died before a replacement kidney or liver could be found. Others had severe immunological responses to the transplanted organs. Atala believed that the solution was clear, if far-fetched: lab-grown organs cultivated out of a patient’s own cells and surgically implanted into the body.


Read more: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/miracle-maker-anthony-atala-winner-smithsonian-ingenuity-awards-2016-life-sciences-180961121/#r757mjkC1sTowLgx.99
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