Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

Hearts – the next stage of the 3D printing revolution

This medical miracle is shockingly close

[Getty Images/iStockphoto] 
issue 01 February 2014

I have seen the future — your future if you’re rich enough or brave enough to embrace it — and I have to tell you, it’s weird.

Imagine this: it’s 2025 and you’re getting on, feeling your knees a bit. You’re bending over one day to pick up junk mail when you feel a terrible pain in your chest. You call 999 and within the hour (in this ideal world) you’re in hospital under the knife. But this isn’t heart surgery you’re having, it’s bottom surgery: the doctor’s taking a chunk of fat from your bum.

Have they made a terrible mistake? No they have not. While you lie in your bed coming round, elsewhere in a lab scientists are sifting through the fat calls, looking for special regenerative ones and starting to reprogram them — to cajole them (don’t ask me how) into becoming new young heart cells.

That done, your future doc walks over to a glass box containing what looks like a printer, but one that squirts living cells instead of ink.

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