Longevity science

Using implants made from porous biocompatible materials, scientists have recently been successful in regrowing things such as teeth, tendons and heart tissue, plus bone and cartilage. The materials act as a sort of nanoscale three-dimensional scaffolding, to which lab-cultivated cells can be added, or that the recipient’s own cells can colonize.

Now, a Spanish research team has used the same principle to grow new brain tissue – the technique could ultimately be used to treat victims of brain injuries or strokes.

A new approach to medical 3D printing is set to speed up the production of body-parts.

Scientists have demonstrated the ability to print three-dimensional blood vessels in seconds. If the technique proves scalable, it could revolutionize regenerative medicine.

Imagine being able to recover from a heart attack by replacing your faulty aortic valve with a brand new one, made of your own cells...

Tissue engineering is definitely an exciting field – the ability to create living biological tissue in a lab could allow scientists to do things such as testing new drugs without the need for human subjects, or even to create patient-specific replacement organs or other body parts.

While some previous efforts have yielded finished products that were very small, a microfluidic device being developed at the University of Toronto can reportedly produce sections of precisely-engineered tissue that measure within the centimeters.

Researchers have created a self-supporting scaffolding of nanowires and coated it with a biocompatible material. They grew heart and nerve cells within this scaffold, which developed into a single structure with embedded nanowires.

With this technology, researchers can work at the cellular scale much more effectively, without damaging the cells and with the capability to observe cells from anywhere within the tissue.