How close are we to 3D printing the human heart?

Re:How close are we to 3D printing the human heart? by Roritharr on Thursday August 15, 2019 @03:00AM (#20703175)

What happened to washing the cells from the underlying collagen structure and using that as a scaffold?

Roughly ten years ago I saw a Nova Science Now episode on this and it looked rather workable, so what's the state of that?

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Re:How close are we to 3D printing the human heart? by Roritharr on Thursday August 15, 2019 @05:46AM (#20703858)

I found a video of the episode:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLs8DeHVkec

around the 7 minute mark there is a pumping heart that was grown ontop of such a scaffold.

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Re:How close are we to 3D printing the human heart? by Roritharr on Thursday August 15, 2019 @06:02AM (#20703918)

Oh wow, the woman in the video had to undergo a lung amputation in 2016, and everything shown in the video seems to be the culmination of a crazy amount of unscientific experimentation on a patient:

> Macchiarini admitted that one year after the operation Claudia had to be repeatedly saved with a stent in her airways, a method which worked so badly for her before. Macchiarini and his team also claimed in 2014 to have been watching over his patient “every 3 months”.

>It was however too late. In July 2016, Claudia underwent a lung amputation. Luckily, she was Macchiarini’s only trachea transplant patient in Barcelona, a second operation was stopped due to technical formalities.

Here is the full, horrifying article.

https://forbetterscience.com/2016/11/02/claudias-trachea/

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