3D printing has been helpful in making plastic knick knacks, action figures, braces for broken arms and phone cases, and now is going to help in making new ears and other organs. A team working on an interesting project using 3D printing has reported success in creating organs which can be used effectively to improve healthcare services.

Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, researchers published a study in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Biotechnology, wherein they detailed a latest 3D printer that has the ability to build biocompatible tissues for use in transplantation, including cartilage, bone, muscle, and an entire human ear. But, the technology hasn't been tested on human beings so far and the researchers aren’t done yet with the final steps of this ambitious project.

Known as the integrated tissue-organ printer (ITOP), the 3D printer has very well dealt with some of the hurdles of 3D printing that stopped researchers from coming up with stable, human-scale tissue constructs.

While speaking to Mashable, research team member Anthony Atala said that the team has printed the structures using cell-laden hydrogels, acting as a sort of ‘bio-ink’. However, using hydrogels is only the first step of making efficient and lasting tissues.

Researcher Anthony Atala told Mashable that one of the main drawbacks of nature is that tissues or cells aren’t going to survive in volumes bigger than 100-200 µm, which means about.1-.2 mm.

Cells have to be sufficiently close to blood-carrying capillaries to obtain the nutrition essential to survive through diffusion.

Atala said, “What we did with the printing technology is we created microchannels in the structure that allowed the nutrition to go through and allow us to basically overcome nature’s limit”.

Other 3D printers don’t function at such a precise or small scale to do what the team of Atala needed, which was to successfully mimic capillaries for keeping the cell-laden hydrogels from deteriorating.

Presently, the medical field generally uses 3D printing for making models for surgeons to see and get ready prior to difficult surgeries.