A company in Queens has managed to transplant a 3-D printed ear to a 20-year-old patient. The beneficiary was a woman who was born with a deformed right ear.
The technology was tested for the first time on a human, representing a major progress in tissue engineering. According to The New York Times, the ear was made from the woman’s own cells and its shape was exactly the same as her left ear. The publication quoted representatives of the company, who said that the cartilage tissue of the ear will continue to regenerate and that it will end up looking and feeling like a natural ear.
Such an achievement creates a precedent for the widespread use of this type of technology. While there are multiple companies focused on regenerative medicine that have been testing this technique for some time, this is actually the first time the procedure was successfully performed on a person.
But it’s only the beginning for this type of technology.
However, it is still early to anticipate a time frame within which the transplant of 3-D printed body parts becomes common practice. The company that performed the transplant did not offer in-detail information about the process, only stating that it was performed under rigorous standards. At the same time, they declared that data regarding the transplant and how it was performed will be published in full at the end of the study.
The testing involves 11 transplants, which will be performed on 11 different people. Considering that trials are still in progress, there is a possibility that some of them may fail. However, since the 3-D printed body parts are actually made from the tissue of the people to whom they will be transplanted, there are good chances that their bodies will fully accept them.
3DBio, the company that managed to achieve these results, has been working on this project for more than seven years. While there are other companies that managed to print 3-D prosthetics made mainly of plastic, the ear transplant seems to be the first one created from living tissue cells.
