A tissue-engineering group has succeeded in creating functional blood vessels and cardiac tissue, using a 'printer' that dispenses cells instead of ink. Gabor Forgacs from the University of Missouri in Columbia and his colleagues printed various tissue structures, including blood vessels and sheets of cardiac tissue. When they printed out cardiac and endothelial cells, the cells fused into a tissue after 70 hours, and began beating in time like regular heart tissue after 90 hours. (source: nature.com)
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