Print your own blood vessels, no need for red toner

Barely 24 hours after we told you about printing your own bones, the franken-science continues with the announcement that blood vessels are next on the body-parts-you-can-print list. Unsurprisingly, you'll need more than just regular toner if you want to start printing your own at home, but pioneering work by application-oriented research organization Fraunhofer has claimed to have cracked it by adding some good old 'two-photon polymerization' into the mix -- yeah, obvious once you know. The added photon special sauce is what makes the printed synthetic tubes biofunctionalized, which in turn enables living body cells to dock onto them -- we're guessing that's important. Sounds cute, but how long until we can start printing whole people -- Weird Science, anyone?

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Print your own blood vessels, no need for red toner originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 19 Sep 2011 13:46:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Source: http://www.engadget.com/2011/09/19/print-your-own-blood-vessels-no-need-for-red-toner/

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