News

Japanese researchers have pushed bio-printing to new levels, producing an artificial blood vessel using a specially designed inkjet machine.

The kit, designed by researchers at Kanagawa Academy of Science and Technology, Tokyo, utilises the same precision, multi-layer technology as traditional inkjet to produce living cells from digital data.

The team at Tokyo Medical and Dental University used the bespoke printer to inject a combination of cells into a calcium chloride solution to form the building blocks of artificial veins and capillaries.

However, professor Brian Derby of the University of Manchester's School of Materials said the findings were likely to be more of an incremental step than a major breakthrough.

He said the Tokyo team was currently doing laboratory-based research, while the "next step is making something sufficiently like a blood vessel that could be transplanted into an animal".

Derby added that clinical trials in humans could be anything from "five to 20 years away."