Bone Printing

“Broken a bone? Let me print you a new one.” OK, that might not be exactly what a doctor would say in the future, but this really is a 3D-printed bone pictured, and scientists really are hoping to use such structures in patients. The artificial bones, in this case a jawbone, are made from a mixture of pulverised natural bone and special biodegradable plastic, which is then printed as lattices in the desired shapes. Stem cells seeded onto such frameworks develop into bone-like cells with much greater efficiency than if seeded onto the plastic alone. That’s because proteins in the pulverised bone guide the cells to attach and develop correctly. Researchers think such bone printing might be particularly useful for patients with deformed, damaged or missing bones of the face, where creating the right shapes with bone fragments taken from elsewhere in the body is especially difficult.

Written by Ruth Williams

Ruth Williams

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Ruth is a freelance science journalist based in the US. She's a regular correspondent for The Scientist, and her work has appeared in The Lancet, Nature, Scientific American Mind, BBC Focus and elsewhere. Twitter @rooph

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• Image courtesy of The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine
• Department of Biomedical Engineering, and Translational Tissue Engineering Center, The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD, USA
• Image copyright held by original authors
• Research published in ACS Biomaterials Science & Engineering