September 10, 2015

I’ve written and spoken enthusiastically about the potential of 3D printing dramatically impacting our future many times before (here, here, and here, for a few examples). But when you talk about 3D printing, people’s minds tend to go to manufacturing: they don’t often think of medicine.

Take for example my friend Dr. Harald Ott, who has been recreating organs and limbs in his laboratory at Harvard, or Danny Cabrera (CEO of BioBots) who has been doing similar work, instead “bio printing” with 3D printers. Printing tissue is…amazing.

Mr. Cabrera was quoted in Fast Coexist describing this technology:

“We’ve been doing experiments on cells in a dish since 1905, and that’s still what we’re doing today to learn about how things work inside of our body, but the body is a three-dimensional structure. Cells in our body are used to interacting with the world in 3-D. The fact that we’ve been doing biology in 2-D for over 100 years now is sort of limiting.”

3D printing allows medical researchers to test drugs on real, live micro-environments before actually using them in patients. The safety implications are impressive. And all of this is costing peanuts.

We are on the edge of an unrecognizably better world.

You can read the full article here.