The history of the prosthesis is long and varied: Knight Götz von Berlichingen had to make do with an iron hand. The South African Oscar Pistorius outran many a sprinter with two complete legs on his blade-shaped plastic lower leg prostheses. And George Washington has long been said to have wooden dentures – in fact, the first US President’s third teeth were made of gold, ivory and even lead. In any case, what they all had in common was that they had to replace missing body parts with something made of foreign material.
But that’s over now – at least when it comes to ear replacements. The American company 3DBio Therapeutics has for the first time created a complete human ear from living tissue using a 3D printer. The researchers took stem cells from a 20-year-old Mexican woman who was born with a so-called microtia, a stunted auricle, and mixed them with the body’s own cartilage tissue to create a “bio-ink”. A scan of the full left ear served as a template for the new ear. This was then printed out in reverse and transplanted onto the right side of the subject’s head. The new ear grew there and now looks completely normal.
Other collagen-rich body parts that tend to wear out, such as intervertebral discs or menisci, could now also be printed with bio-ink. The nose also has a high proportion of cartilage. Had bio-ink and 3D printers been around in the 16th century, the famous Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe would have happily resorted to this technique after losing part of the bridge of his nose in a duel. Instead, he wore a copper foil olfactory bulb.
Read more good news here.