Israeli Researchers Print 3D Heart Using Patient’s Own Cells
The heart took about three hours to print… and is a bit subscale at 2.5 centimeters, said to be the size of a rabbits heart. But it has all the chambers, ventricals and blood vessels. It’s suggested that a full-size heart might take a full day to print. Imagine that… a full day to a replacement heart. A heart that doesn’t have any known flaws, is the right size, doesn’t come with hepatitis and won;t be rejected. The researcher say that it’ll probably make more sense to just print *bits* of a heart as patched for damaged original bits.
This story doesn’t say if the heart came equipped with nerves. I’m a little fuzzy on how the body – and even the mind- controls how hard and fast the heart beat, but clearly current transplanted hearts more or less do the trick, and any nerves there likely don’t link up to the existing nervous system.
And it does raise an interesting idea: how would the body respond if you plugged in auxiliary subscale hearts? The advantages of that evade me at the moment… but then, people poke ink into their skin, pump thickeners into their lips, jam bits of metal through their ears and nose and other parts, and some even chop their junk off, all for no medically necessary reasons. eventually *someone* will pay to have secondary hearts grown and implanted. Maybe swimmers of bicyclists would benefit from thigh-mounted hearts to boost blood flow to the legs, I dunno. Seems almost just as likely that the secondary hearts will actually interfere with blood flow, especially if you go to Thailand to get the work done on a budget.