3D printer yields artificial human tissue

The new type of material consists of thousands of connected water droplets, encapsulated within lipid films, which can perform some of the functions of the cells inside the human body. The researchers believe these printed 'droplet networks' could be the building blocks of a new kind of technology for delivering drugs to places where they are needed and one day even replace damaged human tissues. "We aren't trying to make materials that faithfully resemble tissues, but rather structures that can carry out the functions of tissues," said Professor Hagan Bayley, of Oxford University's Department of Chemistry, who led the research. The researchers say that, because the droplet networks don't contain a genome and don't replicate, they don't have some of the problems found in other artificial tissue creation methods, such as those that use stem cells. According to Prof Bayley, the networks can even be designed to fold themselves into different shapes after printing – so, for example, a flat shape that resembles the petals of a flower is 'programmed' to fold itself into a hollow ball, which cannot be obtained by direct printing.