Bioengineered Hearts Are Coming Sooner Than You Think
By Rishi Ganesh
The premise of medicine itself lies in increasing both the length and quality of life for those in need of aid. Not only do we act as caregivers to each other, with doctors, nurses, and hospital staff providing immediate care to patients that are actively unwell, we act as shields as well. Research and development has arguably an even greater impact on the medical field and its future, creating new technologies and routes to administer treatments.
Many believe that transplants are the future of medicine. As organs deteriorate with age, disease, and trauma, having the ability to simply replace these organs would prove invaluable. Of course, there are only so many hearts, lungs, and kidneys in the world, so we must look to other methods of transplantation. For years, scientists and researchers have theorized that it is possible to create artificial organs through the use of 3D printing. In theory, all that would be required are the necessary cells and the organ may be printed.
However, it isn’t that simple in practice.
In order to truly replicate an organ in its full functional capacity, every fiber must be perfectly in place. Needless to say, it’s extremely difficult to copy the exact muscle fibers and protein chains that lead to the formation of an organ. However, researchers at Harvard University have developed a method that may be able to produce fibers so thin that they actually can accomplish this. Focused Rotary Jet Spinning, or FRJS, is developed based off of textile making, and is able to produce the helical shapes necessary to imitate the real structure of organ fibers, particularly the heart.
However, 3D printers can technically accomplish the same job. So what makes FRJS so special? According to ScienceDaily and Dr. Huibin Chang, where a 3D printer slows down on minute details, the FRJS’s cotton-candy like fabrication allows for much quicker creation of artificial organs. And that means much quicker. While a 3D printer may take over 100 years to create a single heart, the FRJS completes this within the span of a single day. In the span of 1 heart from a 3D printer, the FRJS can pump out over thirty thousand. The implications for healthcare are simply enormous: heart failure, the leading cause of death globally, would become avoidable at a much higher rate. If it expanded to other organs, FRJS could very well take the biotechnology industry by storm.
