Scientists Create New Ear Using 3D Printing And Living Cell Injections WASHINGTON -- Printing out body parts? Cornell University researchers showed it's possible by creating a replacement ear using a 3-D printer and injections of living cells. The work reported Wednesday is a first step toward one day growing customized new ears for children born with malformed ones, or people who lose one to accident or disease. It's part of the hot field of tissue regeneration, trying to regrow all kinds of body parts. If it pans out, "this enables us to rapidly customize implants for whoever needs them," said Cornell biomedical engineer Lawrence Bonassar, who co-authored the research published online in the journal PLoS One. This first-step work crafted a human-shaped ear that grew with cartilage from a cow, easier to obtain than human cartilage, especially the uniquely flexible kind that makes up ears. Wednesday's report is "a nice advancement," said Dr. Three-dimensional printers, which gradually layer materials to form shapes, are widely used in manufacturing.
A 3D printer that manufactures new cancer drugs with drag-and-drop DNA Although, my profs have lamented (many times) that the efficiency of combinatorial chemistry to screen for new drugs is ridiculously low for its cost. De novo synthesis has been responsible for only 1 FDA approved drug (Sorafenib: a tyrosine kinase inhibitor used to treat kidney and liver cancer), although quite a few more are working their way through trials. Most drug discoveries still depends on regular scientists stumbling onto something by serendipity or by following leads produced by those studying plant/animal/mineral sources. Right now, this kind of high-throughput robotic screening is mostly done to polish an already discovered molecule to adjust it's pharmacologic profiles (which is how we now have so many different types of taxanes). oops, I think I confused rational drug design (what you are talking about) which pure combinatorial chemistry (which the machine in the article facilitates and is a more scattershot "toss everything on the wall and see what sticks" approach).
Apres l'imprimante 3D, l'imprimante biologique.. Une machine à téléporter la vie ? Il a déchiffré le génome humain, crée le premier être de synthèse – une bactérie – il se prépare désormais à « téléporter la vie ». S’il y a bien un homme qui joue à se prendre pour Dieu, c’est Craig Venter. Ce chercheur controversé planche aujourd’hui sur un « convertisseur biologique digital » qui devrait permettre de télécharger des séquences d’ADN numérisées pour synthétiser artificiellement virus, protéines, et même cellules vivantes. Plutôt que d’aller en pharmacie chercher ses antibiotiques, pourrons-nous un jour « imprimer » directement nosantibiotiques depuis chez nous ? L’homme l’affirme avec assurance : « il ne s’agit pas d’extrapolation fantaisistes sur l’avenir. [Vidéo] Conférence TED : Craig Venter explique comment la synthèse artificielle de la vie va révolutionner la recherche en biologie Imprimer des extraterrestres ? « La vie est le logiciel de l’ADN », explique Craig Venter, qui s’attache actuellement à créer la première « cellule récipient universelle ».
Organs on Demand | The Scientist Magazine® - Nightly RENAL RECONSTRUCTION: Wake Forest postdoctoral fellow Hyun-Wook Kang operates a 3-D printer that is making a kidney prototype with cells and biomaterials.IMAGE COURTESY OF WAKE FOREST INSTITUTE FOR REGENERATIVE MEDICINE On a stage in front of an audience of thousands, a futuristic-looking machine squirted gel from a nozzle. Layer by layer, it built up the material, shaping it into a curved, pink, kidney-shape structure based on a medical CT scan of a real organ. It was 2011, and Anthony Atala, director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, was demonstrating his progress in using three-dimensional (3-D) printing to make a kidney during his TED Talk. Like a TV chef pulling a previously baked casserole from the oven, Atala soon held a bean-shape object in his gloved hands. But Atala had not made a functional human kidney, as he at times seemed to imply and as the Agence France-Presse reported in a widely disseminated article. From playthings to medical devices Blood trouble
3DR RepRap Delta Printer - Part 1 - Release - Mini Maker-Faire London - Nightly Hello Everyone,This post sees the release of my 3DR Delta printer design. I know a lot of you have been asking for it. I had planned to do another monster post on full 3DR assembly, but as documentation is taking much more time to get completed, instead of delaying the release any further I thought it best to do a series of Blog posts to show assembly, setup, calibration, and firmware config in stages. 3DR (V2_001) Release. 3DR attracted a lot of attention for the entire Maker-Faire day, much more than I expected. Here are a few photo's of some of the objects we printed using the fine filament faberdashery provided to all exhibitors during the faire. This was a popular one - the colours mix between clear at the bottom, bands of increasing rainbow and gold eventually fading into silver. - Print time of 67mins / 0.125mm layers @ 105mm/sec 0.3mm mixing nozzle. A Joris Weekly cup (Nr22) printed in Bling Bling Gold, mixed with various rainbow colours. Special thanks to - Johann C.
The Achilles’ Heel of 3D Printing We think we know what makes things expensive to make We’ve all got a surprisingly clear idea of exactly what it is that makes something really difficult and hideously expensive to produce: serious complexity. The cost of just about everything we make goes up exponentially as the physical functionality of its innards gets more sophisticated (big things containing motors and gears, for example, are rarely ‘as cheap as chips’: even silicon chips are only cheap because, despite their enormous complexity, we can and do make them in enormous quantities). But there’s an exception In 3D printing, our whole intuitive concept of ‘cost related to complexity’ is turned on its head. The cost of creating things using a 3D printer ‘goes down with complexity’: the more complex the item being printed, the less it costs to print it. Complexity actually reduces 3D printing costs, are you serious? The notorious 3D printing ‘complexity paradox’ greater complexity = more + bigger voids = less ink = lower cost
Une reproduction en 3D du foetus pour les parents Une firme japonaise propose aux parents nippons de conserver un souvenir unique d'une grossesse, sous la forme d'une reproduction tridimensionnelle du foetus, réalisée grâce à une technique d'impression en relief. Selon la société Fasotec, cette réplique en résine créée à partir d'échographies et images réalisées par résonance magnétique, intéresse les couples pour qui les traditionnels clichés en noir et blanc sont insuffisants. Le foetus est reproduit au stade de sept à huit mois de grossesse, de façon à bien faire apparaître les détails de son anatomie. Au final, la "sculpture" de 9 cm de hauteur en représente un modèle réduit. «Puisqu'on ne peut pas être enceinte plus d'une fois du même enfant, nous avons reçu des demandes de mères pour créer ce type d'objet qui permet de garder un souvenir des sensations de cette période», a expliqué à l'AFP un responsable de Fasotec, Tomohiro Kinoshita.
World's First 3D-Printed Architecture by Smith | Allen Bryan Allen and Stephanie Smith of Smith Allen Studio may have created the world’s first 3D-printed architecture with their Echoviren structure. Made of assembled 3D-printed bricks, Echoviren was a site responsive, 3D printed architectural installation as part of the Project 387 Residency. The building was assembled deep in the heart of a redwood forest. Spanning 10x10x8 feet, Echoviren is a translucent white structure that pops out in the natural forest environment, but when inside, its frame makes your eye go up, up high to the canopy of the forest. Echoviren was fabricated, printed, and assembled on site by the designers and the structure was assembled utilizing a paneled snap fit connection to create a smooth surface.
Researchers develop 3D-printed flying drones capable of self-assembly News: a research team in Zürich has created a flock of helicopter robots that can detect each others' positions and join together to create a larger flying machine. The Distributed Flight Array (DFA) has been developed by a team of researchers at the Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control (IDSC) at ETH Zürich university in Switzerland. Each robot has a 3D-printed hexagonal plastic chassis with magnets fixed to the sides of the frame and a single propeller fitted in the middle. Independently, the honeycomb-shaped robots fly in an erratic and uncontrolled way. Each independent module exchanges information with the others and uses sensors to determine how much thrust it needs for the array to take off and maintain flight. "The Distributed Flight Array is a flying platform consisting of multiple autonomous single propeller vehicles that are able to drive, dock with their peers and fly in a coordinated fashion," explains the IDSC. Watch a video of the DFA system in action here:
Poppy, le plus français des robots à la disposition de tous Imaginez un robot à votre disposition, prêt à faire n’importe quoi pour vous, même à danser pour vous divertir. Eh bien votre souhait est exaucé, Poppy, ce petit robot humanoïde français est performant dans tous les domaines. Découvrez dès maintenant, les caractéristiques surprenantes de ce robot made in France. Poppy est le fruit d’une collaboration entre le Flower Lab de l’INRIA à Bordeaux et la grande école de l’ENSTA ParisTech qui ont allié leurs connaissances pour créer cette innovation. Du haut de ses 84 cm, ce petit humanoïde pèse 3,5 kg et possède 25 actionneurs, ses proportions identiques à celle du corps humain lui permettent d’avoir une démarche fluide et naturelle. Le squelette du robot a entièrement été réalisé avec des éléments imprimés en 3D, il faut compter seulement deux jours pour le monter. Le coût de fabrication d’un tel robot est de 7500 € comprenant les moteurs, les pièces imprimées en 3D et les composants électroniques.