healthcare technology

Janssen Research and Development, a Johnson & Johnson pharmaceutical company, is looking into 3D printing living tissue for drug research, according to a document filed with the SEC Thursday. The company will partner with Organovo, an expert in bioprinting.

Organovo has 3D-printed everything from blood vessels to thyroid tissue, and has long-term plans to print entire organs. Later this year it will begin offering liver tissue to drug companies for testing the toxicity of drugs — its first commercial product.

Janssen is more interested in using 3D-printed tissue to discover drugs. By exposing many different 3D-printed cells to many different early-stage drugs, it can determine which are the most effective. Janssen and Organovo did not disclose further details about the agreement.

A chance connection over the internet has spawned multiple efforts to provide 3D printed hands at an extremely low cost.

Around the world, there are people who have lost all or part of their hand, or were born without one. There are also people and institutions with 3D printers. Pair the two, and you can print a custom mechanical hand for $20-150 — thousands less than the typical prosthetic.

e-NABLE, which functions through a website, Facebook page and Google+ page, stepped up to connect the two after site founder Jon Schull came across work by American prop maker Ivan Owen, who made a metal mechanical hand for South African carpenter Richard Van As. Van As had lost four of his fingers in a carpentry accident.

Owen was then contacted by a mother whose 5-year-old son needed a hand. He again made a metal hand for the boy. But then he turned to 3D printing. MakerBot gave both Owen and Van As a 3D printer.

The pair developed a 3D printed hand for the boy and then posted the design to Thingiverse, where anyone could download and print it.

Van As and Owen’s efforts toward developing 3D printed hands live on via the Roboand project, which has created more than 200 hands and now branched into prosthetic fingers and arms. But Schull was interested in connecting people who needed hands with individual makers and institutions that had 3D printing skills, but potentially idle printers.

He started a Google+ page, and then a Facebook page and website. More than 300 makers make their services available to people who contact e-NABLE about a hand. Just a quick scroll through posts on the Facebook page reveals many, many people who have a use for a hand.

A team of researchers out of Duke University recently announced they’ve grown human skeletal muscle in a dish. The muscle responds to electrical impulses, biochemical signals, and drugs just like muscle tissue in our bodies.

It’s hoped that in the future such lab-grown tissues might serve as a way to test new drugs and study diseases outside the human body without risking a patient’s health. They might also be used to provide more personalized therapies.

“We can take a biopsy from each patient, grow many new muscles to use as test samples and experiment to see which drugs would work best for each person,” said Nenad Bursac, associate professor of biomedical engineering at Duke and a lead researcher on the study.

Bursac and Lauran Madden, a postdoctoral researcher in Bursac’s laboratory, grew the muscle tissue by first adding “myogenic precursors,” a kind of proto muscle cell, to a three-dimensional scaffolding and nutrient gel in a dish. As the cells matured, they lined up and formed working muscle fibers (shown here at the top of the page).

The buzz about 3D printing can at times give the impression that the technology is a panacea that makes all manufacturing cheaper. The truth is 3D printing has one very specific use case: It makes prototypes and custom, one-of-a-kind items cheaper and faster to make.

Medicine would seem like a prime beneficiary of this technology, potentially using 3D printing to provide patients with custom-made implants and stents. Yet, to date, medical researchers have focused on the most ambitious goals for the technology, such as replacement organs printed from a patient’s own stem cells, which need years of development before they reach average patients.

Recently, a somewhat more modest medical device — and one that could find its way relatively quickly into treatment protocols — was created using 3D printing. Researchers Igor Efimov from Washington University in St. Louis and John Rogers from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign used MRI and CT scans of rabbit and human hearts to 3D-print custom-fitting flexible mesh sacs that fit each heart perfectly and stayed in place as it beat.

“Each heart is a different shape, and current devices are one-size-fits-all and don’t at all conform to the geometry of a patient’s heart,” said Efimov.

Inside its fabric, the mesh can also hold sensors that monitor for signs of trouble and deliver electrical pulses, if needed. The sensors are embedded in the fabric using technology similar to what Google has said it will use in sugar-monitoring contact lenses, only more nuanced.

Doctors can position the sensors or electrodes more precisely using the wrap than by attaching them directly to the heart with sutures or adhesives, Efimov and Rogers state in a recent paper in Nature Communications. They demonstrate in the paper that sensors attached to the mesh (or multifunctional integumentary membrane) accurately measure temperature, mechanical strain and pH, and could deliver pulses of electricity.

Depending on the sensors used, the heart wrap could improve treatments for a range of disorders; it could also be used to deliver medication directly to where its needed. But the device was conceptualized specifically to treat ventricle deformities and arrhythmias. The arrhythmia atrial fibrillation affects about 4 million Americans; patients often undergo a surgery that destroys the heart’s own drummer, the atrioventricular node, and subsequently receive a pacemaker.

Now that kids are using 3D printers to build their own new limbs, a group of Philadelphia doctors is exploring how to use the technology to build kid-sized devices.

A group of pediatric specialists at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia want to find out how 3D printing can be used to create customized devices for the complex needs of its pediatric patient populations.

One frustration of pediatrics is that it tends to be an area overlooked by medical device companies. Children represent a relatively small market that doesn’t lend itself to mass production. Adapting adult medical devices for children can be problematic. But when you factor in subtle developmental differences, that can make it more complicated to find the best medical device for children.

Dr. Jorge Galvez, an anesthesiologist at CHOP and a professor of anesthesiology and critical care at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, talked about the group at the kickoff of DreamIt Venture’s new program with CHOP. It began collaborating with University of Pennsylvania engineering students Nicholas McGill and Michael Rivera after they won a challenge by the Society for Technology in Anesthesia.

The annual contest this year turned its attention to 3D printing applications. It sought ideas for applying the technology to developing a Williams intubating airway that could be adjusted based on measurements from a CT or MRI scan. That particular technology is especially useful for a pediatric hospital because there’s a need for specialized devices for children with variations in the shapes of their airways.

Galvez said the idea is that the 3D printing think tank would develop applications for the technology across different pediatric specialties. Among the specialties represented in the group are cardiology; anesthesiology; ear, nose and throat; and orthopedics. “There’s a lot of low-hanging fruit in this area, such as customized prosthetics,” said Galvez. “The challenge is not about using the printer, but having the knowledge and expertise to know what the needs of each specialty are.”

The idea is that as the practice of 3D printing becomes more mature, customized devices could be developed more rapidly.

Read more: http://medcitynews.com/2014/02/pediatic-hospital-physicians-initiate-3d-printing-think-tank/#ixzz2tzkmX62K

Surgeons in Swansea, South Wales, have used CT scans to create detailed three-dimensional images which will be used to create the printed implants.

Cutting edge 3D printing technology is being used to recreate the severely injured face of a road accident victim. A team of British surgeons are poised to carry out a pioneering operation, which will restore the symmetry of a man’s face, using new parts produced by a printer. The unaffected side of the biker’s face has been used to create a mirror image, which will enable perfect facial reconstruction.

Computer images are being used to create titanium implants using Additive Manufacturing, which commonly known as 3D printing.

The images are used both to design guides to cut and position facial bones with pinpoint accuracy and create tailor-made implants for the patient.

The guides and implants are being produced in medical-grade titanium in Belgium, at one of the world’s few specialist 3D printing facilities.

Surgeons in Swansea, south Wales, used an X-ray CT scan to create minutely detailed three-dimensional images to design the bespoke implants. 

The work is considered so groundbreaking and radical it already features in an exhibition at London’s Science Museum, even before the operation itself has been carried out.

more at : http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2506038/3D-printing-used-reconstruct-mans-FACE.html