You can print a lot of things with a 3D printer. A gun, a home, a dinner.

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Soon, you could even print new pieces of yourself.

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While most uses of 3D printing involve extruding layers of plastic through a nozzle to create a three-dimensional structure, before too long, similar technology could let physicians print structures made of human cells — from tiny structures like ‘organs on a chip’, to huge ones like whole replacement organs.

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“Bioprinting has a great promise — it has a lot of advantages and capabilities. Of course, it’s not really perfect yet, but despite that, we have all these good things going on in the field,” says Dr Ibrahim Ozbolat, principal investigator at Penn State University’s bioprinting-focused Ozbolat Lab. One of those things is making replacement organs. The process of bioprinting human tissue is a bit more involved than, say, 3D printing […]

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