La bio-impression 3D, une révolution pour la médecine régénérative | Luciano Vidal | TEDxRennes
Translator: Ilayda Gokgoz Reviewer: Elisabeth Buffard I am Luciano, Argentinian by origin. I’d have loved to come and talk to you about football, however, my expertise is 3D bio-printing. What is 3D bio-printing? It consists in making tissues and organs with a 3D printer. No, no, I am not crazy, I am just a surgeon and a researcher who comes to explain to you how it is possible. Two encounters guided me towards this expertise. The first was with my surgery teacher in 2002. His speciality was ear reconstruction. The ear is a very complex organ. Just the outer ear is composed of eight parts and two cartilages. I asked myself the question: ″How can we make ears?″ The second encounter, I was heading to the swimming pool of a great hotel when I ran into a colleague who gave me a magazine. I never reached the pool because I was fascinated by a scientific article explaining how we could use fat cells to make a bone. These two encounters would mark my life as a researcher in the world of 3D bio-printing. Our body is a marvelous machine which is naturally self-healing. You fall, you burn yourself, your body will engage a healing process. But like any machine, it has its limits. For example, we do not have the capacity, like the lizard, when it loses its tail, we all know that it rebuilds It’s called limb self-regeneration. If the burn is too deep or if one of your organs is malfunctioning, then your machine needs with a helping hand from outside. And that is the whole point of regenerative medicine. The first organ transplant was made in 1950. At the time, it was a myth coming true. This event really changed the practice of medicine, and also started the needs for organ donation. Scientific progress is magnificent and accompany us. The fields of research are promising, but when we mention the needs for organ donations, and the number of donors, it’s a catastrophe. In France, 20,000 people are waiting for a transplant while there are only 6,000 transplants a year. That is an average of over three years waiting for a transplant. Time to die multiple times. With my teams, I dedicate a lot of my time trying to print tissue and vital organs such as skin, heart, blood vessels, intestine. Today, it is a reality. We can print tissue in the laboratories to replace damaged tissue. It’s called tissue engineering. Tissue engineering is part of regenerative medicine. This medicine works on cell regeneration, of course, in printing tissue such as muscles and also for the creation of vital organs such as skin and heart, using 3D bio-printing. With this technology, we need both elements to make our organs: a bio-compatible ink, like collagen, and the healthy cells of a patient. The combination of these two elements will precisely allow eliminate the risk of rejection. So far, we created our first sheet of tissue, our first cell layer. This perspective is fascinating. But, as I just said, this is just the first layer. To make skin, I need ten layers. To make a heart, more than two hundred layers So that’s the goal of using the 3D printer to print like a tome of cell layers until my organ becomes solid. You can imagine the endless possibilities! Take the example of a severely burnt victim. We are currently working to print directly on the patient’s injury guided by a scan inside the operating room. Within five years, the anatomical repair will be to the exact size of the wound, without the necessity of an additional graft. These revolutionary and innovative practices involve three key factors. The first factor is our material, the ink we call a bio-material, which organizes cells and the support of these cells. Like Breton seaweed. The second factor is the cells. To print the tissue and the print organs, we need millions and millions and millions of cells. So the primary objective is precisely to amplify the amount of cells needed from a small pellet of a tissue or organ. The third and most important factor, and this phase, it is the most complex, it is : how are we going to give life to these printings? Bringing science to life, it is to ensure organs can process oxygen and the nutrients necessary to its development. Our organs present a network interconnected blood vessels in order to be completely vascularized and oxygenated. Bio-printing tissue is not enough, we must make them functional. And todo so, the interconnection between millions of cells is fundamental. We are many in the world working on this research. The subject is very complex. Everything is going very fast. It won’t be easy. Today, I print tissue. And I am convinced that within five years, we will know how to print skin with its sensitivity and functionality. And within ten years, we will transplant bio-printed organs directly in the surgery room. And for me, it is extremely motivating, every day, to say to myself: ″My future, it is to imprint our future.″ Thank you. (Applause)