Listen Up!!! Doctors in the US have 3D-printed body parts

This breakthrough, as described in Nature Biotechnology,raises the hope of using living tissues to repair the body. Until these developments, the concept reproducing individual human cells in a precise pattern to replace (say) a missing ear (picture courtesy of Wake Forest) has been limited by the challenge of keeping the cells alive. The team at Wake Forest has developed a technique that 3D-prints a tissue impregnated with ultra-thin micro-channels to allow nutrients to penetrate the tissue.

As a result, Prof Atala said tissues could now be printed on a human scale which will certainly open new doors for medicine.

Speaking to the BBC News website, he said "Let's say a patient presented with an injury to their jaw bone and there's a segment missing.

"We'd bring the patient in, do the imaging and then we would take the imaging data and transfer it through our software to drive the printer to create a piece of jawbone that would fit precisely in the patient."

Prof Atala added: "In this study we printed a wide range of tissue strengths - from muscles as a soft tissue to cartilage and bone as a hard tissue showing a whole range of tissue strengths is possible.

"The hope is to continue work on these technologies to target other human tissues as well."

Prof Martin Birchall, a surgeon at University College London, told the BBC the results were "striking". He said "The prospect of printing human tissues and organs for implantation has been a real one for some time, but I confess I did not expect to see such rapid progress.

He cautioned there was still more research to be done before the printer could be used in patients.

But he concluded: "Given the scale of this breakthrough, progress in other fields, the resources available to the researchers at Wake Forest and the imperatives for human health, I think it will be less than a decade before surgeons like me are trialling customised printed organs and tissues."