Learn how to make body parts

It’s not quite Frankenstein, but now regular punters can see how some of the world’s best scientists are using the 3D printing technology to replicate body parts.
The University of Wollongong’s Australian Institute for Innovative Materials this week launched a month-long online course to provide a small dose of what students could be learning if they enrol in science or materials engineering degrees, and in UOW’s newly launched biofabrication postgraduate qualification.
Australia is a world leader in biofabrication, UoW’s Gordon Wallace, who has taken charge of the online course, says.
Professor Gordon, who leads the UoW-headquartered Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Electromaterials Science, with equipment and technical support from the Australian National Fabrication Facility, says course material will be presented in a language understood by general audiences, with case studies to illustrate the impact biofabrication is already having with customised medical devices.
“We started this journey only a few short years ago by taking off-the-shelf office printers and having our engineers rebuild them to be able to print a bio-ink, embedded with human cells, that we had just developed,” he says.
“In the short time since, revolutionary scientific advances in 3D printing technology and the development of amazing biomaterials, which can seamlessly integrate into the body, means we may be only a few years away from a time when every major hospital will contain 3D printing capabilities.”
UoW is not alone in focusing on biofabrciation. The Queensland University of Technology’s Institute of Health and Biomedical Innovation has for years been working on replicating and replacing body parts with 3D printed equivalent.
For two years the institute has been running clinical trials involving large animals, with Mia Woodruff, who leads its Biomaterials and Tissue Morphology Group telling the ABC in August the next step would be to put “scaffolds” into humans.
The UOW course will include sessions on the printing of personalised titanium hip implants using laser melting, as well as made-to-fit masks for facial transplants and the potential for lab-grown organs structured through the inkjet printing of living cells.
“This emerging field of biofabrication is being made possible through connections between medicine and technology and we are now seeing previously unimaginable developments, such as prosthetic limbs controlled by thought alone, and bionic implants to restore lost senses, and of course, (the) 3D printing of human organs,” Professor Wallace says.
The course is being run through FutureLearn.

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