Mice with 3D-Printed Ovaries Successfully Give Birth | Hacker News Reader

Mice with 3D-Printed Ovaries Successfully Give Birth

smithsonianmag.com

115 pointsvezycash13 comments

Very cool. I hadn't come across this before.

News does appear to be one year old, though: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/may/16/3d-printed-o...

didn't get why gelatin over collagen. It is kind of obvious and explicitly mentioned that gelatin/hydrogel is very weak as a construction material (there is a reason why nature uses collagen which is polymerized gelatin (or gelatin being the broken down collagen)), and the small thin 2D patch scaffold made out of it is already an achievement that this article is dedicated too, and it is hardly scaleable beyond that, at least not into 3D structures, i.e. dead end for the most of organ engineering, while there is no such issues with collagen.

My guess would be that, because gelatin is the shorter form of the polymer (not entirely sure on that one, but it makes sense to me) it lends itself to manipulation much easier. So while it's weaker, it's going to be easier to work with to make something viable for a prototype. It might also be that it made the release of the eggs easier to design in to the artificial organs.

I did my PhD in a lab with a few people do 3d printing of organ scaffolds. Many (all?) of them used gelatin over collagen - I think the main factor was cost being much lower. There may have been something about gelatin being easier to extrude in a 3d printing process as well. I think the idea is that gelatin is a prototyping material.

Because gelatin more closely approximates the basement membrane upon which cells grow. Matrigel (commercial) has been the standard for 3D Cell cultures for ages.

Poor mice!

hype. they printed containers for follicles harvested from a live animal.

Fantastic, if this really translates into human ovaries it will greatly expand the viability of otherwise unfertile couples, and together with better health care and fertility drugs we can tremendously increase the "threatened" human population. We'll finally be able to overrun every other species on the planet, including ants and bacteria. Yay humanity! </s>

A technological organic reproduction replacement in a world overrun with carcinogen-induced infertility combined with ever-longer lifespans? I'd accept that Timelord headcanon.

Yes, only infertility stops humans from unbounded exponential population growth. All other factors are irrelevant.

Your shitty sarcasm is a poor substitute for actually engaging with the context of the article or the science. It's sort of like objecting to medical research for the same reason.

It's just that the countries and peoples that are decadent enough to buy into something like this are all so behind on the replacement rate anyway that printing false ovaries for every barren woman won't be enough to turn it around.

Meanwhile us third-worlders will be breeding like bunnies with or without plastic ovaries.

Yeah how terrible that this will help restore endocrine function in young cancer patients

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