14 DAY TRIAL // Bioengineers at the Cardiovascular Innovation Institute (CII), in Louisville, Kentucky say that they will be able to use three-dimensional printers to construct fully-working human hearts within the decade.
Many research groups around the world are already working on developing biomedical 3D printing technologies, either for the human heart, or for other organs such as lungs, liver, kidneys and so on.
At this point, artificial human hearts can be constructed only in bioreactors, by placing a patient's stem cells in a heart scaffold cleaned of its old cells. However, CII researchers want to be able to produce organs that are perfectly capable of replacing a patient's own without fear of organ rejection.
CCI director Dr. Stuart Williams believes that the Institute is just 10 years away from perfecting this new technology. His group, and others like it, are already receiving significant support, since everyone knows just how important such a breakthrough would be.
“America put a man on the Moon in less than a decade. I said a full decade to provide some wiggle room,” Williams said recently. Heart disease are currently the number one killer in the United States, RT reports.