Bye-bye organ donors? Not too far in our future lies the
technology that will enable 3D printing of a variety of different
organs and biological structures. 
Nature News recently
covered the success by Gabor Forgacs and his colleagues at the
University of Missouri in Columbia of printing various tissue
structures, including blood vessels and sheets of cardiac tissues.
Not only was the printing process a sucess, but once printed, the
cardiac and endothelial cells fused into a tissue after 70 hours
and began beating like a natural heart after only 90 hours.
Beyond that, Forgacs has his eye on fully implantable whole
organs printed from a patient’s own cells. “You give us your cells:
we grow them, we print them, the structure forms and we are ready
to go,” he says. “I am pretty sure that full organs will be on the
market [one day].” The kidney may be one of the first, he predicts,
as its filtering function is relatively simple. “It may not look
exactly like a kidney, but it will function exactly like
one.”
For more information on the science behind this amazing
technology, check out these videos by
the University of Missouri or
ABC coverage on the topic.
And thus, accelerating change in biotechnology continue its
march forward to a future that we can only imagine to be full of
extraordinary medical break-throughs, as indicated by these early
discoveries.
As we replace body parts and increasingly rely on technology to
keep us healthy and alive, a whole Pandora’s Box of new threats is
creaking open. Case in point is a new
study unveiled at the last IEEE Symposium that has determined 
implantable heart defribrillators (ICD) and pacemakers to be
vulnerable to radio-attack.
The crafty researchers conducting the experiment, which analyzed
the security and privacy properties of an implant “designed to
communicate wirelessly with a nearby external programmer in the 175
kHz frequency range”, reverse-engineered the communications
protocol for one such device by using an oscillator and a software
radio. They then successfully implemented “several software
radio-based attacks that could compromise patient safety and
patient privacy.”
While this may sound like a bit macabre, the researchers insist
it was all done with the best intentions.
“[W]e believe that this snapshot is necessary toward assessing
the current trajectory of IMD security
and privacy,” they noted in their report, “We hope that the
analyses and defenses presented in this paper will motivate broader
scientific investigations into how to best provide security,
privacy, safety, and effectiveness for future implantable medical
devices.”
Continue Reading
French scientists unveiled the world’s first fully functional artificial heart at the cost of about $192,000 a unit. The heart, which gets some of its design from modern aerospace research, consists of two pumps which help regulate flow.
The reason this is called the first fully functional artificial heart is that, unlike other hearts currently made, it comes equipped with sensors which can increase or decrease blood flow depending on the persons level of activity. “The same tiny sensors that measure air pressure and altitude in an airplane or satellite are also in the artificial heart. This should allow the device to respond immediately if the patient needs more or less blood.”(CNN) Current models require an outside regulator to adjust blood flow to the body (and only consist of one pump).
Continue Reading
