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 ORLANDO, Fla. (Ivanhoe Broadcast News) -- More than 94,000 Americans are on the transplant waiting list. Every 13 minutes, a new person joins that list. Every 90 minutes, someone on that list dies waiting for an organ. Now, scientists are on the verge of changing those grim statistics.
In most respects, Kaitlyne McNamara is like all 17-year-old girls. She loves to talk on the phone. She loves school and walking her dog. But unlike her peers, McNamara has a spine-damaging condition called spina bifida.
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"It's hard living with any disability, especially spina bifida, because I'm paralyzed, and so I have difficulty walking sometimes," she says.
 When her bladder stopped functioning six years ago, life got a lot harder. She says, "It like made me self-conscious about myself because I don't like having accidents, and I don't like being in school when I have them."
That inability to control her bladder had McNamara facing a lifetime on dialysis. Instead, she became one of just seven people in the world to receive a custom-made bladder built by human hands.
Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center researchers in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, grow the bladders from the patient's cells.
 "We've heard phrases like 'science-fiction' and 'this stuff is out of this world,'" Mark Van Dyke, Ph.D., a tissue engineer at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center, tells Ivanhoe. "We can grow those cells outside the body and create a new organ, put it back into the patient, and it's genetically matched to that patient so there is no rejection."
Researchers take cells from a healthy section of the bladder. Those cells are grown in the lab then transferred to a bladder-shaped scaffold. It's worked in all seven patients. The team can also grow urethras, blood vessels and heart valves.
"We have probably 20 or 30 different organs or tissues that we are working on," Dr. Van Dyke says.
 But it takes months to build just one organ. To go mainstream, scientists need a faster way to make lots of organs. Biological Physicist Gabor Forgacs, Ph.D., has a solution -- a 3-d printer that could, yes, actually print organs.
"We need the ink; we call it the bioink. We need the paper; we call it the biopaper. We need the printer; the bioprinter," Dr. Forgacs, of University of Missouri-Columbia, tells Ivanhoe. The printer drops clumps of live cells onto the biopaper. Those drops fuse together and self-assemble into the desired shape. One of the first tests was a chicken heart.
 Dr. Forgacs says, "We print the block of tissue and eventually would like that tissue to synchronously beat just as a heart would ... and it does."
Bioprinting is in its early stages, but research on lab-grown organs is moving fast. It's already given McNamara a new bladder.
"I'm really thankful for them finding something to help me," she says. "Thank you." It's a heartfelt tribute to scientists who have turned the seemingly impossible into a life-changing reality.
The Wake Forest team has already started human trials on urethras that were grown in the lab, and their work on blood vessels is getting closer to human trials. As for the printer, that's still several years away from human trials, but scientists believe organ printing could very well be mainstream medicine in our lifetime.
This article was reported by Ivanhoe.com, which offers Medical Alerts by e-mail every day of the week. To subscribe, click on: http://www.ivanhoe.com/newsalert/.
If you would like more information, please contact:
Forest University Baptist Medical Center
Department of Regenerative Medicine
regenmed@wfubmc.edu
Forest University Baptist Medical Center
Urology Department
(336) 716-4131
Katherine Kostiuk
University of Missouri-Columbia News Bureau
kostiukk@missouri.edu
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