Speaker 1: Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Speaker 1: Forward Thinking. Hi there everyone, Welcome to Forward Thinking. I
Speaker 1: am host number one Jonathan Strickland, and with me our
Speaker 1: hosts two and three introduce yourselves. Hi, I'm Lauren Vocalbam.
Speaker 1: Hi am Joe McCormick. And what are we talking about today? Joe, Well,
Speaker 1: we're gonna be talking about three D printing. And to
Speaker 1: start off a little bit, Uh, three D printing is
Speaker 1: basically exactly what it sounds like. The way you print
Speaker 1: a document today is you get an image of what
Speaker 1: that document would look like on your computer and that's
Speaker 1: digitally rendered. It's sent to the printer, and then the
Speaker 1: printer creates that in the real world with ink on
Speaker 1: a page. Now, of course that's basically for all intensive
Speaker 1: purposes two dimensional. Extend that another dimension. Now you have
Speaker 1: a machine that takes a digital model and it creates
Speaker 1: a three dimensional object. So this is what we would
Speaker 1: call additive manufacturing. So you can take any kind of
Speaker 1: multiple material like plastic or glass or metal, and you
Speaker 1: can create an object with a printer that lays on
Speaker 1: tiny layers, one little bit at a time to create
Speaker 1: any object. You can design in a digital way. Cool. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and this is used in a lot of different fields,
Speaker 1: including in manufacturing. A lot of prototypes are made this
Speaker 1: way because, uh, you know prototypes. Traditionally, the way that
Speaker 1: people would make a prototype model of a product would
Speaker 1: be to take some sort of material and carve away
Speaker 1: at it until you reach whatever you know your destination
Speaker 1: product is. Hence additive manufacturing instead of subtractive exactly. Yeah, yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: because you're subtracting material to get to what you want.
Speaker 1: But with three D printing, you're you're just adding what
Speaker 1: is needed, so there's there's not really you don't have
Speaker 1: that problem of waste like you would if you were
Speaker 1: carving or melting stuff way. So here's an even cooler
Speaker 1: thing that we could do with three D printing. Though
Speaker 1: of course you can make a chess piece or an
Speaker 1: action figure. Those are both on my list, right, What
Speaker 1: if you could make a kidney or a liver so like,
Speaker 1: and you're talking not for dinner, but for actual medical
Speaker 1: purposes in an organ that works. That that is phenomenal
Speaker 1: and there are people who are working on that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's actually hypothetically not all that very far off. Researchers
Speaker 1: have just recently created the first the first live human
Speaker 1: well they're they're working towards the first live human tissue.
Speaker 1: They've created a three D printer that instead of using
Speaker 1: ink or plastic or or whatever else you would put
Speaker 1: in a printer, it deals out these droplets of embryonic
Speaker 1: human stem cells um in a nutrient soup. And it
Speaker 1: does this so gently and so precisely that the cells
Speaker 1: remain living and remain capable of developing two different cell types.
Speaker 1: So what you could do is, by using these stem
Speaker 1: cells and using the appropriate type of tissue, you could
Speaker 1: print them in such a formation as to create an organ.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's that's kind of like the the goal
Speaker 1: we're talking about the end right now. They're basically just
Speaker 1: just printing little layers of soup and saying the soup
Speaker 1: could become something someday. Layers of soup. That's that sounds
Speaker 1: like a great name for a band, not a Frank's
Speaker 1: Apple album, It might very well be. You know, kids,
Speaker 1: ask your parents the yeah, this is this is some
Speaker 1: really cool applications here. Well, yeah, they already think they
Speaker 1: can do some really amazing things with this. Just one
Speaker 1: example is, um imagine, there's a burn victim who has
Speaker 1: lots of cellular damage all over the surface of the body. Um. Now,
Speaker 1: in some cases, if the burns are small enough, you
Speaker 1: could get skin grafts that helped cover up the burned areas.
Speaker 1: But imagine if there are a lot of burns that
Speaker 1: there's you know, you can't cover it with skin grafts. Well,
Speaker 1: you could print with a with a medical three D printer,
Speaker 1: you could print a layer of cells to go over
Speaker 1: the burned areas that could help help the wound heal
Speaker 1: faster and help prevent infection and contend disease. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: that's incredibly important with burns. Infection is one of those
Speaker 1: things that can make a serious condition a critical condition. Uh.
Speaker 1: And that's true for any major injury. And in fact,
Speaker 1: I was reading about potential Actually I wasn't reading. I
Speaker 1: was watching. There was a great video a TED talk
Speaker 1: by Anthony Atala and this dates back to two thousand
Speaker 1: eleven when he was talking about a potential new technology
Speaker 1: that what it would do is scan someone who has
Speaker 1: suffered a wound and then after scanning the wound would
Speaker 1: immediately start to print repairs to the body. So that
Speaker 1: could be tissue everything from from muscle tissue to ligaments,
Speaker 1: to bone, to even to skin, so that it would
Speaker 1: be a multi pass system. The first pass would be
Speaker 1: the scan, the next pass would be printing, and it
Speaker 1: would probably scan and print, scan and print, and you
Speaker 1: would he wounds incredibly rapidly, not quite so fast as
Speaker 1: in the series that we all love, Star Trek. It's
Speaker 1: not quite a trick quarter yet, not not yet, but
Speaker 1: it's it's that's a phenomenal idea. And and beyond that,
Speaker 1: there's the idea of just printing out a replacement organ
Speaker 1: based upon the patient's cells, so that the organ has
Speaker 1: a high does not have as higher risk of being
Speaker 1: rejected by the body. So that's something we all know about.
Speaker 1: You know, you in order to get a transplant these days,
Speaker 1: you have to have an organ donor, and that donor
Speaker 1: has to be compatible with the patient. By printing, you
Speaker 1: could print out an organ that's already compatible with the patient,
Speaker 1: and that reduces the chance the body will reject the organ.
Speaker 1: You're never going to reduce that chance to zero, at
Speaker 1: least not based on our understanding of how the human
Speaker 1: body works right now, but you could definitely impact it.
Speaker 1: And all of this is pretty far off. I mean,
Speaker 1: like I said, they're right now using embryonic human stem cells.
Speaker 1: If we could move into using peripotent stem cells from
Speaker 1: made from adult sure adult stem cells. Where it's the
Speaker 1: issue here is that embryonic stem cells have the opportunity
Speaker 1: to develop into lots of different kinds of tissue. Adults
Speaker 1: stem cells tend to be more already a little specialized
Speaker 1: that they're limited in what kind of tissues they can
Speaker 1: become based upon our most of our applications right now,
Speaker 1: but this would give us many more options right when
Speaker 1: we're when we need to pronoup material. Also, I should
Speaker 1: point out that three D printers can work in biomedical materials,
Speaker 1: not just actual human tissue. They've been practicing with using
Speaker 1: different artificial human tissue right that can that can be
Speaker 1: printed out and then using a very focused laser zapped
Speaker 1: into into an appropriate form to form for example, of
Speaker 1: blood vessel. And this this is incredible stuff. It's also
Speaker 1: very tricky because there are only so many materials that
Speaker 1: you can introduce to a human system without the risk
Speaker 1: of action or rejection. But one application outside the human body,
Speaker 1: of course, would be research. Sure, Yeah, if you could
Speaker 1: manufacture organs that you could do research on without endangering
Speaker 1: actual human tissue that's attached to somebody or a cute, fuzzy,
Speaker 1: funny rabbit or yeah, yeah you could. You're having to
Speaker 1: take it from yeah yeah. I think about think about
Speaker 1: pharmaceutical tests where grant. This raises up a lot of
Speaker 1: ethical questions. You know, I'm sure people would ask is
Speaker 1: it ethical to create artificial you're creating real organs using
Speaker 1: this three D printing technique. Actually, if you used any
Speaker 1: technique to do this, but three D printing is the
Speaker 1: one we're concentrating on. Um if you were to create
Speaker 1: those organs, is it ethical to be able to do
Speaker 1: these sort of tests? From my perspective, I I tend
Speaker 1: to think yes. I think that's far more ethical than
Speaker 1: having to ask for a volunteer population or to take
Speaker 1: animals which have no ability to consent to the sort
Speaker 1: of test testing, and to think like, Okay, well we've developed,
Speaker 1: for instance, we've developed a new drug that's meant to
Speaker 1: fight off a Shuler disease, but we don't know how
Speaker 1: it would affect healthy tissue. This would be a way
Speaker 1: of being able to do those tests in a manner
Speaker 1: that's not going to put at risk the life of
Speaker 1: an actual person, so it could be incredibly effective. Also,
Speaker 1: I think it's important to remember that for us to
Speaker 1: reach that amazing future where we have the six million
Speaker 1: dollar man, uh, not all of those parts need to
Speaker 1: be robotic in nature. We can create bigger, faster, stronger
Speaker 1: organs because we'll have the technology. No way, I just
Speaker 1: want a stomach that lets me eat ghost peppers without
Speaker 1: feeling badly afterwards, because I loves the spicy. But you know, hey,
Speaker 1: the show is not all about how does Jonathan take
Speaker 1: future technologies and bend them to his own will? No,
Speaker 1: it kind of is really okay alright, so no, I
Speaker 1: definitely want that. But seriously though that the the potential
Speaker 1: benefits here are phenomenal. It means that we could get
Speaker 1: to a point where there won't be a place for
Speaker 1: you to put on your driver's license that you're an
Speaker 1: organ donor because it's not necessary, which would be a
Speaker 1: wonderful world to live in where people who have a
Speaker 1: desperate need for an organ transplant aren't in a waiting
Speaker 1: game where they have no idea when, if ever they
Speaker 1: will receive an oregan right and hopefully eliminate an organ
Speaker 1: black market all of that kind of scary territory. Sure. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean if we're talking about something that is widely
Speaker 1: distributed in particular, then you have eliminated an entire uh
Speaker 1: possible black market. You know, you've reduced the risk of
Speaker 1: of people being forcibly uh submitted to organ transplants. For
Speaker 1: the TV will have no more jokes about bathtubs. Full
Speaker 1: advice that would be do we want to live in
Speaker 1: that world where we don't have that joke? That's okay
Speaker 1: because we have other jokes like aren't you glad you
Speaker 1: didn't turn on the light? Those police procedural There's also
Speaker 1: the you know, the the hook that's hanging from the
Speaker 1: door handle. There are plenty of other urban legends that
Speaker 1: we can really concentrate. True, the next generation of prosthetics
Speaker 1: could make that story history too, that's true. Well, you
Speaker 1: know what, I'm confident that our futuristic world will generate
Speaker 1: all new urban legends for us to to really focus on.
Speaker 1: You know, but yeah, you'll have the I don't know
Speaker 1: what the robot hanging off the exactly he has the
Speaker 1: robotic arm and thinking that law, the crazed robot that
Speaker 1: roams the hills. Oh man, I look forward to telling
Speaker 1: that urban legend around a digital campfires one day. But yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: this is getting back to the three D printing in
Speaker 1: the human tissue to get a little more serious. This
Speaker 1: is something that I am really genuinely excited about. It's
Speaker 1: this thought of of being able to to really improve
Speaker 1: the health conditions of people who desperately need it. And
Speaker 1: of course we're all starting to live longer. I mean
Speaker 1: our our our health has improved over time so that
Speaker 1: our lifespans have extended quite a bit, and that means
Speaker 1: that there are more opportunities for things to fail. So
Speaker 1: more and more of us are going to be in
Speaker 1: an experience where something like this might be necessary. So
Speaker 1: to see this technology starting to blossom today and know
Speaker 1: that within you know, a generation or two, it may
Speaker 1: be sophisticated enough where an Oregon donor is something that
Speaker 1: just you you've only heard about in you know, history
Speaker 1: text history textbooks or visiting me in the old folks
Speaker 1: home when I sit there and talk about the the
Speaker 1: old days when you had to wait for a donor. Um.
Speaker 1: So I'm I'm genuinely excited about this and I can't
Speaker 1: wait to see how it continues. And uh, and so
Speaker 1: that wraps up our discussion here on three D printing
Speaker 1: and human tissue. We've got so much more to say, guys,
Speaker 1: make sure you visit our website. It's forward thinking dot Com,
Speaker 1: that's f w thinking dot Com. We take these topics
Speaker 1: and we really break them down in video format, in
Speaker 1: the audio podcast and blog posts, and we really want
Speaker 1: to hear from you and what you are interested in
Speaker 1: and the sort of things that gets you excited about
Speaker 1: the future, because this really needs to be a conversation.
Speaker 1: So make sure you join us and we will talk
Speaker 1: to you again really soon. We're more on this topic
Speaker 1: and the future of technology. Visit forward thinking dot Com
Speaker 1: brought to you by Toyota. Let's go Places.