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Lab-Made Heart Represents 'Moonshot' for 3D Printing
An ambitious 3D-printed heart project aims to make a natural organ replacement for patients possible within a decade. But the researcher heading the "moonshot" effort also believes 3D-printing technology must harness the self-organizing power of biology to get the job done.
The idea of a 3D-printed heart grown from a patient's own fat stem cells comes from Stuart Williams, executive and scientific director of the Cardiovascular Innovation Institute in Louisville, Ky. His lab has already begun developing the next generation of custom-built 3D printers aimed at printing out a complete heart with all its parts — heart muscle, blood vessels, heart valves and electrical tissue.
"We can print individual components of the heart, but we're building next-generation printers to build the heart from the bottom up," Williams said.
The heart represents one of the most ambitious goals for researchers working to create 3D-printed organs within the field of regenerative medicine. The ability of 3D printing to build human tissue by laying down living cells layer by layer has already allowed researchers to create small chunks of organs such as livers and kidneys — often by using stem cells extracted from fat or bone marrow as the source material.
Williams and the Cardiovascular Innovation Institute have started out by first using 3D printing to create individual parts of what they have deemed the "bioficial" heart. That piecemeal approach could eventually allow researchers to print and piece together a fully functional heart within a week.
"I took a step back and looked at my colleagues, and said, 'Why don’t we build it like a large airplane?'" Williams told LiveScience. "Separate the organ into separate components, figure out the best way to make the components, and then put them together."
But building full-size organs also requires researchers to print human tissue in a way that includes the intricate networks of tiny blood vessels that keep the organs healthy. Williams envisions 3D printing as an ideal way to make smaller blood vessels — he and his colleagues have already built large blood vessels for transplant use in surgeries using methods other than 3D printing.
Still, 3D printers can only do so much bioengineering when working at the tiniest scales. The best printers may only print structures with the size of millimeters, whereas the smallest blood vessels can have a width of just a few microns, Williams explained, where 1 millimeter is equal to 1,000 microns.
That's why 3D printing may only get researchers partway toward the goal of creating a complete heart. Instead, researchers will have to rely upon the natural self-organizing tendency of cells to knit together blood vessels and eventually connect everything within a 3D-printed organ — a process that could take place within 24 hours.
"We will be printing things in the order of tens of microns or more like hundreds of microns, and then cells will undergo their biological developmental response in order to self-organize correctly," Williams said.
Most researchers don't expect full-size, 3D-printed organs to become reality anytime within the next 10 or even 15 years, but the Cardiovascular Innovation Institute continues to forge ahead with its goal of building a 3D-printed heart within a decade. Williams expects the next generation of "bioprinters" to begin rolling out in December.
Source: http://www.livescience.com/41280-3d-printing-heart.html
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Founded by Russian entrepreneur Dmitry Itskov in February 2011 with the participation of leading Russian specialists in the field of neural interfaces, robotics, artificial organs and systems.
The main goals of the 2045 Initiative: the creation and realization of a new strategy for the development of humanity which meets global civilization challenges; the creation of optimale conditions promoting the spiritual enlightenment of humanity; and the realization of a new futuristic reality based on 5 principles: high spirituality, high culture, high ethics, high science and high technologies.
The main science mega-project of the 2045 Initiative aims to create technologies enabling the transfer of a individual’s personality to a more advanced non-biological carrier, and extending life, including to the point of immortality. We devote particular attention to enabling the fullest possible dialogue between the world’s major spiritual traditions, science and society.
A large-scale transformation of humanity, comparable to some of the major spiritual and sci-tech revolutions in history, will require a new strategy. We believe this to be necessary to overcome existing crises, which threaten our planetary habitat and the continued existence of humanity as a species. With the 2045 Initiative, we hope to realize a new strategy for humanity's development, and in so doing, create a more productive, fulfilling, and satisfying future.
The "2045" team is working towards creating an international research center where leading scientists will be engaged in research and development in the fields of anthropomorphic robotics, living systems modeling and brain and consciousness modeling with the goal of transferring one’s individual consciousness to an artificial carrier and achieving cybernetic immortality.
An annual congress "The Global Future 2045" is organized by the Initiative to give platform for discussing mankind's evolutionary strategy based on technologies of cybernetic immortality as well as the possible impact of such technologies on global society, politics and economies of the future.
Future prospects of "2045" Initiative for society
2015-2020
The emergence and widespread use of affordable android "avatars" controlled by a "brain-computer" interface. Coupled with related technologies “avatars’ will give people a number of new features: ability to work in dangerous environments, perform rescue operations, travel in extreme situations etc.
Avatar components will be used in medicine for the rehabilitation of fully or partially disabled patients giving them prosthetic limbs or recover lost senses.
2020-2025
Creation of an autonomous life-support system for the human brain linked to a robot, ‘avatar’, will save people whose body is completely worn out or irreversibly damaged. Any patient with an intact brain will be able to return to a fully functioning bodily life. Such technologies will greatly enlarge the possibility of hybrid bio-electronic devices, thus creating a new IT revolution and will make all kinds of superimpositions of electronic and biological systems possible.
2030-2035
Creation of a computer model of the brain and human consciousness with the subsequent development of means to transfer individual consciousness onto an artificial carrier. This development will profoundly change the world, it will not only give everyone the possibility of cybernetic immortality but will also create a friendly artificial intelligence, expand human capabilities and provide opportunities for ordinary people to restore or modify their own brain multiple times. The final result at this stage can be a real revolution in the understanding of human nature that will completely change the human and technical prospects for humanity.
2045
This is the time when substance-independent minds will receive new bodies with capacities far exceeding those of ordinary humans. A new era for humanity will arrive! Changes will occur in all spheres of human activity – energy generation, transportation, politics, medicine, psychology, sciences, and so on.
Today it is hard to imagine a future when bodies consisting of nanorobots will become affordable and capable of taking any form. It is also hard to imagine body holograms featuring controlled matter. One thing is clear however: humanity, for the first time in its history, will make a fully managed evolutionary transition and eventually become a new species. Moreover, prerequisites for a large-scale expansion into outer space will be created as well.
Key elements of the project in the future
• International social movement
• social network immortal.me
• charitable foundation "Global Future 2045" (Foundation 2045)
• scientific research centre "Immortality"
• business incubator
• University of "Immortality"
• annual award for contribution to the realization of the project of "Immortality”.
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