Inside the Weird World of 3D Printed Body Parts

Startups in the U.S. are working on printing nipples and bits of liver tissue, while a Russian provocateur claims to have on-demand thyroids

Laura Bosworth wants to 3D print breast nipples on demand. The CEO of the Texas startup TeVido Biodevices is betting on a future in which survivors of breast cancer who have undergone mastectomies will be able to order up new breasts printed from their own living cells.

“Everyone,” she says, “knows a woman who has had breast cancer.” Right now their options are limited. Reconstructed nipples using state-of-the-art plastic surgery techniques, she says, “tend to flatten and fade and don’t last very long.” A living nipple built from the patient’s own fat cells, and reconstructed to the precise specification of the original nipple, could go a long way to ameliorating the psychological trauma often associated with mastectomies.

Bosworth readily acknowledges that significant obstacles must be overcome before 3D printed breast parts become an affordable reality. Despite the waves of hype that surged after Anthony Atala, a Wake Forest professor, wowed a TED crowd in 2011 by purporting to print a human kidney on stage, no one has yet used a 3D printer to create a functional human organ.

The science is only half the battle. Venture capitalists aren’t exactly beating down the doors of TeVido. It’s a lot easier, observes Bosworth, to raise money “for an app that lets you order a taxi” than for a biomedical breakthrough that will cost millions of dollars in R&D before beginning the lengthy process of clinical trials needed to bring a product to market.

Yet Bosworth is convinced that a $6 billion market awaits whoever gets out of the lab first. “The field itself has grown tremendously,” says TeVido co-founder Thomas Boland, one of the first scientists to start modifying ordinary 3D printers to print layers of living cells instead of ink. Researchers far afield, in China and Russia and Switzerland, at Ivy League labs and in the biotech hotbed of San Diego, are all pushing bioprinting forward. The disciplines of material science, cell biology and computer-controlled manufacturing are all merging.

If we believe everything we’ve heard recently, we’ll be 3D printing our food, our cars, our homes, our electronics—heck, the entire structure of globalized trade will be disrupted when we’re 3D printing everything we need in our living rooms rather than having it shipped in containers from China. The possibilities seem near infinite, even if the present-day realities are constrained.

As overblown as this swirling rhetoric may seem, the realms of science fiction and cold, hard bioprinting fact have convened at least once in real life, in the uncanny meeting of the minds of a nipple builder, a pioneer in tissue fabrication and a (possibly) mad Russian futurist. In that brief convergence one can glimpse the grandiose visions that cautious scientists tend to keep to themselves. Absurdity mingles with the commonplace. And you’re reminded of the most astounding thing of all: how today we’re talking, in matter-of-fact, business-savvy tones, about the actual printing of human body parts.

Now, back to the nipples.

In 2000 Thomas Boland was an assistant professor at Clemson University, in South Carolina, when he first conceived of modifying a standard HP inkjet printer to place layers of cells on top of one another, earning him the sobriquet “the grandfather of bioprinting.” He is now the director of the biomedical engineering program at the University of Texas El Paso. In 2010, Bosworth, a retired executive who previously worked at Dell Computers, met Boland through a mentoring program that matched entrepreneurially minded scientists at the university with business veterans.

“The more I learned about the potential for this technology, the more I thought that this was amazing stuff,” recalls Bosworth. “I said to Thomas one day, ‘we should start a company,’ and he said let’s do it.”

It’s easy to understand Bosworth’s fascination. The technology of 3D bioprinting is at once relatively simple to describe and utterly astounding. Instead of extruding multiple layers of plastic or some other composite to create an inanimate physical object, a bioprinter prints a “bio-ink” of living cells. Typically, layers of different cell types are intermixed with layers of an “extracellular matrix”—a gel in which the cells are suspended.