Hope for the Tin Man

5 April 2013

Approaches to printing organs and tissues are evolving fast as research by Professor Hagan Bayley, Professor of Chemical Biology at Hertford, reported in this week’s Science shows. Hagan’s paper describes not living cells, but synthetic printed material made to act like them. Until now, those who have thought about printing artificial organs have assumed they would be made of real cells. Hagan’s approach, using a custom 3D printer, offers an alternative: artificial organs made of artificial cells.