Wake Forest University’s team of scientists has printed out living human body parts, such as ears, muscles and jawbones, using a combination of living cells and a special gel.

The move has come up as an advance on earlier attempts, which included making a plastic scaffold and then trying to get cells to grow in and on it, or that printed out organ shapes that came out as being too floppy and dying, after some time.

The latest approach has mixed live cells with a gel, starting out as a liquid but rapidly hardens to the constancy of living tissue, and layers them in with very small tunnels serving as passages for nutrients for feeding the cells until blood vessels can grow in and perform the job naturally.

Study leader Dr. Anthony Atala of the Wake Forest University Institute for Regenerative Medicine said that they have actually printed the scaffolds and the cells together.

While speaking to NBC News, Atala said they have shown that they can grow muscle. And they have made ears the size of baby ears, jawbones of the size of human jawbones, and are ready to test for other organs as well.

In the journal Nature Biotechnology, the scientists have described both the new 'bioprinting' technology and the organs they have grown using it.

The team wrote, “We present an integrated tissue-organ printer (ITOP) that can fabricate stable, human-scale tissue constructs of any shape. The correct shape of tissue construct is obtained from human body by processing computed tomography (CT) or magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data in computer-aided design software”.

For over 10 years, Atala has been putting in efforts to make grow-your-own organ transplants. There are many others who have been trying and working on bio-printed hands.