Miracle! In a world's first, this woman got an ear transplant with 3D Printing process!

3DBio Therapeutics, a biotech company in Queens had used 3D printing to make a body part with a patient's own body cells for the first time ever! A 20-year old woman from Mexico has had her external ear reconstructed with a living tissue implant using a special technology called 3D printing, the New York Times report mentioned. It is developed especially for people dealing with microtia, a rare congenital condition in which a person has one or both ears absent or incompletely formed from the outside.

The transplant was performed in March on a 20-year-old Mexican lady who was born with a small and malformed right ear, according to the New York Times. The biotech company explained that this implant was made up of a 3D-printed collagen hydrogel scaffold and the patient's own cartilage cells. The structure was printed in a size and form that matched the patient's opposite ear for implantation, the report mentioned.

The surgeon who performed the procedure, Dr. Arturo Bonilla, said the approach could replace current techniques for reconstructing the outer ear, which includes taking cartilage from patients' ribs, which is a more invasive procedure, or using porous polyethylene (PPE) implants, with ears reconstructed using the new implant thought to be more responsive. Though it is necessary to conduct the long-term monitoring of patients who receive the implants, 3DBio's CEO, Dr. Daniel Cohen, called the technology's real-world application "a genuinely historic event." He expressed hope that the clinical experiment could have implications beyond microtia.

“Our initial indications focus on the cartilage in the reconstructive and orthopedic fields including treating complex nasal defects and spinal degeneration. We look forward to leveraging our platform to solve other high-impact, unmet medical needs like lumpectomy reconstruction and eventually expand to organs,” Dr. Bonilla said.

Professor Anthony Atala, head of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine in the United States mentioned that tissue-engineered ears created from the patient's own cells had previously been implanted in humans. China has previously reported on an implant created from such cells cultivated on a polymer scaffold. However, compared to manually engineered tissues, 3D printing hopes to give a variety of advantages, such as, scale-up, improved design precision, and cheaper costs.