Fresh-Printed Pate - The New French Cuisine.

Our dad talked to me about this the other day so I had to look it up.  They print biomaterials using a 3D printer and then seed cells onto the structures to make functioning organs.  This is interesting to me because I work with biomaterials for regeneration, but possibilities exist for the removal of all animal cruelty in the food industry, well, not in the near future, but you can imagine.  We could print steaks and seed some cells onto them, they can be made to order with different fat content etc.

Aside from that, the idea of smart biomaterials to form scaffolds for regeneration is very important.  This TEDx presentation presents the idea of taking a piece of tissue the size of half of a postage stamp to regenerate an entire organ as if that would be easy.  I would not give up half a postage stamp of my bladder, it would leak all over the place!  I guess if it was already leaking it would be something to consider, but this idea works much better in animal models when the subjects are all genetically identical so the piece of organ from one rat will not be rejected by the rat it is implanted into.  Anyway, Anthony Atala gives an interesting presentation that very nicely sums up the biggest goal for my area of study (except I'm working with neuro-regeneration).

S