Laura Bosworth wants to 3D print breast nipples on demand. The CEO of the Texas startup TeVido Biodevices is betting on a future in which survivors of breast cancer who have undergone mastectomies will be able to order up new breasts printed from their own living cells.
“Everyone,” she says, “knows a woman who has had breast cancer.” Right now their options are limited. Reconstructed nipples using state-of-the-art plastic surgery techniques, she says, “tend to flatten and fade and don’t last very long.” A living nipple built from the patient’s own fat cells, and reconstructed to the precise specification of the original nipple, could go a long way to ameliorating the psychological trauma often associated with mastectomies.
Bosworth readily acknowledges that significant obstacles must be overcome before 3D printed breast parts become an affordable reality. Despite the waves of hype that surged after Anthony Atala, a Wake Forest professor, wowed a TED crowd in 2011 by purporting to print a human kidney on stage, no one has yet used a 3D printer to create a functional human organ.
The science is only half the battle. Venture capitalists aren’t exactly beating down the doors of TeVido. It’s a lot easier, observes Bosworth, to raise money “for an app that lets you order a taxi” than for a biomedical breakthrough that will cost millions of dollars in R&D before beginning the lengthy process of clinical trials needed to bring a product to market.
Yet Bosworth is convinced that a $6 billion market awaits whoever gets out of the lab first. “The field itself has grown tremendously,” says TeVido co-founder Thomas Boland, one of the first scientists to start modifying ordinary 3D printers to print layers of living cells instead of ink. Researchers far afield, in China and Russia and Switzerland, at Ivy League labs and in the biotech hotbed of San Diego, are all pushing bioprinting forward. The disciplines of material science, cell biology and computer-controlled manufacturing are all merging.
If we believe everything we’ve heard recently, we’ll be 3D printing our food, our cars, our homes, our electronics—heck, the entire structure of globalized trade will be disrupted when we’re 3D printing everything we need in our living rooms rather than having it shipped in containers from China. The possibilities seem near infinite, even if the present-day realities are constrained.
As overblown as this swirling rhetoric may seem, the realms of science fiction and cold, hard bioprinting fact have convened at least once in real life, in the uncanny meeting of the minds of a nipple builder, a pioneer in tissue fabrication and a (possibly) mad Russian futurist. In that brief convergence one can glimpse the grandiose visions that cautious scientists tend to keep to themselves. Absurdity mingles with the commonplace. And you’re reminded of the most astounding thing of all: how today we’re talking, in matter-of-fact, business-savvy tones, about the actual printing of human body parts.
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