Ozbolat told HuffPost Live's Caroline Modarressy-Tehrani that while current research is focusing on replacing failed organs, he's also interested in the prospect of developing a "brand new organ" that doesn't exist in nature but which could be transplanted to "enhance the functionality of the human body."
And he's thinking big. One possibility is an organ that generates electricity inside our bodies.
"For complicated organs -- for example, if the heart fails -- then you need a pacemaker. The pacemaker runs with batteries, and when the battery needs to be replaced, surgery is needed," he said. That procedure could be eliminated by creating "an organ that is going to be part of the human body and generate electricity that can run the heart."
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| There is still long way to go before fully functional organs |
As our first real "bioprinting" experiment, we wanted to start with something simple, instead of jumping straight into printing with live cells. We decided to print with a solution of arabinose onto filter paper. Then we cut out the filter paper, and put it onto an agarose plate on which we had grown a lawn of E. coli that we had engineered to carry the pGLO plasmid. This plasmid carries the Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP), under control of an arabinose-sensitive promoter. (Stay tuned for an instructable on how to make your own GFP-expressing E. coli).
As a result, wherever we had printed arabinose on the filter paper, we now saw the E. coli light up green under UV light! Note that the beauty of this experiment lies in its simplicity: we only had to print with a simple sugar solution, rather than with bulky live cells; and we were printing on paper, so we didn't even have to change the paper handling machinery. You could also try printing with antibiotics, or even proteins, such as enzymes or growth factors.
