The Printed Kidney

Originally posted Feb 2011.

Researchers may soon make human organs with an inkjet printer. Really.

At TED, everyone’s favorite meetup of really amazing nerds, strange things are expected, but none quite as strange, to me at least, as Anthony Atala’s live fabrication of a kidney shape in front of the auditorium audience, using a specially designed printer. I had heard of making plastic or metal parts via “rapid prototyping”, also known as “3D printing”, but I had never heard of it being done for tissue. Let me reiterate, though, this kidney is not yet real.

Reports of real kidneys popping out of Hewlett-Packards are greatly, and accidentally, exaggerated. Popular Science reported that the kidney was real, and linked to another article that also said the kidney was real. Fast Company reported that Luke Massella, the young man who appeared as Dr. Atala’s guest for the presentation had received a regenerated kidney, not a regenerated bladder. Wake Forest University, Dr. Atala’s employer, had to put out a press release correcting the errors. (Note that @TEDNews, one of the official TED Twitter accounts, posted “Today's #TED, fresh from TED2011: Anthony Atala prints a human kidney” even after that press release.)

On the one hand this is unfortunate, because it makes this breakthrough seem a little less amazing than it really is (and could lead people to mistakenly believe that the need for organ donors is diminishing). On the other hand, this is terrible, because there were so many amazingly cool parts of that presentation that went largely unnoticed by the press.

For example, some of this regenerative stuff is already being done. Not just “kidney shapes”, but actual reconstruction of body parts. Dr. Atala showed two x-rays of a patient with what appeared to be a collapsed vein or duct (further research showed it to be a urethra), then a later x-ray with the urethra intact, having been partially replaced with lab-grown tissue. That’s pretty amazing stuff! Dr. Atala also showed how some prototype organ construction has taken place inside repurposed commercial inkjet printers, which struck a chord with me, as an admirer of the DIY ethos. (Note that the kidney was not printed on an inkjet.)

As for the speculative part of the talk, Dr. Atala showed how people with flesh wounds might one day be scanned by an optical scanner while lying on an operating table, then have the right replacement tissue printed right onto the existing tissue. You know in episodes of Star Trek, where the doctor waves his or her magical cylinder in front of the patient, and the wound just disappears? That.

There were enough truly amazing parts of the presentation that it’s just a shame that the facts were distorted. My advice? Go to the source; watch the TED video, and check out the Wake Forest Institute of Regenerative Medicine site. It’s truly amazing what these researchers are doing.