These technologies hold the promise to greatly improve the quality of health and average lifespan of human beings in the near future.
That's the benefit of NIH to help solve the organ transplant deaths that followed in recent news by releasing this report of their findings and clinical trials.
Introduction
Organ failure is the leading cause of mortality all over the world despite advances in interventional, pharmacological, and surgical therapies. Bioartificial organ manufacture has been a long-term dream since then beyond the memory of man. Throughout history, people have tried many ways to prolong life through substitution or restoration of defective/failed organs. Currently, orthotopic organ transplantation is the only effective way to achieve this; however, it is seriously limited by issues such as donor shortage, high price, immune rejection and ethical conflict.
With rapid developments in science and technology, some advanced material processing technologies, such as multi-nozzle rapid prototyping (MNRP), additive combined molding (or additive combined molds), decellularized matrix regeneration, electrophoresis, and magnetic adsorption of cells have emerged, making the area of bioartificial organ manufacturing more and more attractive. A common feature of advanced organ manufacturing technologies is that they have the capacity to integrate heterogeneous cell types and multiple materials to recapitulate native organ geometries, constituents and functions.
How to assemble heterogeneous living cells with predesigned architectures, including hierarchical vascular, neural and/or lymphatic networks, while ensuring that the corresponding functionality is realized, is one of the main concerns of bioartificial organ manufacturing technologies.
Generally, an artificial organ is an engineered device that can be implanted or integrated into a human body—interfacing with living tissue—to replace a natural organ, to duplicate or augment a specific function or functions so the patient may return to a normal life as soon as possible. According to the materials used, artificial organs can be divided into three main classes: mechanical, made of inanimate polymers (i.e., plastics) and/or metals; biomechanical, made of partially living cells and inanimate polymers and/or metals; and biological (i.e., bioartificial), made of living cells, biodegradable polymers and/or metal elements. Normally, the former two classes can only partially and temporarily replace and repair the failed organs in the human body, while the biological class can totally and permanently restore defective/failed organs.