My printer cartridge is almost out of liver

Printing Organs on Demand

Need a skin graft? A new trachea? A heart patch? Turn on your printer, and let it spit one out.

A group of researchers hope printers' whirs and buzzes will soon be saving lives.

Led by University of Missouri-Columbia biological physics professor Gabor Forgacs and aided by a $5 million National Science Foundation grant, researchers at three universities have developed bio-ink and bio-paper that could make so-called organ printing a reality.

So far, they've made tubes similar to human blood vessels and sheets of heart muscle cells, printed in three dimensions on a special printer.

"I think this is going to be a biggie," said Glenn D. Prestwich, the University of Utah professor who developed the bio-paper. "A lot of things are going to be a pain in the butt to print, but I think we can do livers and kidneys as well."