Printing New Skin: Saving Lives with Ink Jet Printers
- 14 years ago
By modifying an ink jet printer and growing skin cells from a patient's body, a U.S. Army research lab has developed an amazing treatment for severe burns: printing new skin.
Once the patient's skin cells are in a sterile ink cartridge, a computer uses a three dimensional map of the wound to guide the printing.
The bio-printer drops each type of cell precisely where it needs to go, explains Kyle Binder, a biomedical scientist at the Armed Forces Institute of Regenerative Medicine's Wake Forest lab. The wound gets filled in and then those cells become new skin.
Once the patient's skin cells are in a sterile ink cartridge, a computer uses a three dimensional map of the wound to guide the printing.
The bio-printer drops each type of cell precisely where it needs to go, explains Kyle Binder, a biomedical scientist at the Armed Forces Institute of Regenerative Medicine's Wake Forest lab. The wound gets filled in and then those cells become new skin.