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\"The body is the most complex machine in the world, and the only one for which you cannot get a replacement part from the manufacturer. For centuries, medicine has reached for what's available--sculpting noses from brass, borrowing skin from frogs and hearts from pigs, crafting eye parts from jet canopies and breasts from petroleum by-products. Today we're attempting to grow body parts from scratch using stem cells and 3D printers. How are we doing? Are we there yet? In Replaceable You, Mary Roach explores the remarkable advances and difficult questions prompted by the human body's failings. When and how does a person decide they'd be better off with a prosthetic than their existing limb? Can a donated heart be made to beat forever? Can an intestine provide a workable substitute for a vagina? Roach dives in with her characteristic verve and infectious wit. Her travels take her to the OR at a legendary burn unit in Boston, a \"superclean\" xeno-pigsty in China, and a stem cell \"hair nursery\" in the San Diego tech hub. She talks with researchers and surgeons, amputees and ostomates, printers of kidneys and designers of wearable organs. She spends time in a working iron lung from the 1950s, stays up all night with recovery techs as they disassemble and reassemble a tissue donor, and travels across Mongolia with the cataract surgeons of Orbis International. Irrepressible and accessible, Replaceable You immerses readers in the wondrous, improbable, and surreal quest to build a new you\"-- Dust jacket flap.

To address the lack of ethical guidance for the safe and responsible design and conduct of early-phase clinical trials of bio-artificial organs, De Jongh et al. conducted a systematic review to examine the literature on early-phase clinical trials in these adjacent fields. The survey suggests that liver transplant providers may experience discrimination based on gender or race, lack of mentorship or support for discriminatory actions and very low rates of female representation in living transplant leadership positions, the lowest being in liver transplant surgery. Conflict of interest The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. 1.

\"The science of bionics helps extend and save lives. Explore how people get inspired by animals and plants to improve human lives. Then learn about the technology used in modern bionics and its future\"-- Provided by publisher.

Regenerative medicine has emerged as a novel alternative solution to organ failure which circumvents the issue of organ shortage. In preclinical research settings bio-artificial organs are being developed. It is anticipated that eventually it will be possible to launch first-in-human transplantation trials to test safety and efficacy in human recipients. In early-phase transplantation trials, however, research participants could be exposed to serious risks, such as toxicity, infections and tumorigenesis. So far, there is no ethical guidance for the safe and responsible design and conduct of early-phase clinical trials of bio-artificial organs. Therefore, research ethics review committees will need to look to related adjacent fields of research, including for example cell-based therapy, for guidance. In this systematic review, we examined the literature on early-phase clinical trials in these adjacent fields and undertook a thematic analysis of relevant ethical points to consider for early-phase clinical trials of transplantable bio-artificial organs. Six themes were identified: cell source, risk-benefit assessment, patient selection, trial design, informed consent, and oversight and accountability. Further empirical research is needed to provide insight in patient perspectives, as this may serve as valuable input in determining the conditions for ethically responsible and acceptable early clinical development of bio-artificial organs.

Patient-specific vascular replicas are essential to the simulation of endovascular treatment or for vascular research. The inside of silicone replica is required to be smooth for manipulating interventional devices without resistance. In this report, we demonstrate the fabrication of patient-specific silicone vessels with a low-cost desktop 3D printer. We show that the surface of an acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) model printed by the 3D printer can be smoothed by a single dipping in ABS solvent in a time-dependent manner, where a short dip has less effect on the shape of the model. The vascular mold is coated with transparent silicone and then the ABS mold is dissolved after the silicone is cured. Interventional devices can pass through the inside of the smoothed silicone vessel with lower pushing force compared to the vessel without smoothing. The material cost and time required to fabricate the silicone vessel is about USD $2 and 24 h, which is much lower than the current fabrication methods. This fast and low-cost method offers the possibility of testing strategies before attempting particularly difficult cases, while improving the training of endovascular therapy, enabling the trialing of new devices, and broadening the scope of vascular research.

Regenerative medicine is the new frontier in the field of organ transplantation. Research groups around the world are using regenerative medicine technologies to develop bio-artificial organs for transplantation into human patients. While most of this research is still at the preclinical stage, bio-artificial organ technologies are gearing up for first-in-human clinical trials in the not-too-distant future. What are the ethical conditions under which early-phase clinical research of bio-artificial organs can be conducted safely and responsibly? What lessons can be learned from prior experiences with early-phase clinical trials in adjacent fields of research? This is a Meeting Report of an online international workshop organised in the context of the Horizon 2020-funded VANGUARD project, which is developing a bio-artificial pancreas for the treatment of patients with type 1 diabetes.

The mass transfer behavior in a hollow fiber membrane module of membrane-based artificial organs (such as artificial liver or artificial kidney) were studied by numerical simulation. A new computational fluid dynamics (CFD) method coupled with K-K equation and the tortuous capillary pore diffusion model (TCPDM) was proposed for the simulations. The urea clearance rate predicted by the use of the numerical model agrees well with the experimental data, which verifies the validity of our numerical model. The distributions of concentration, pressure, and velocity in the hollow fiber membrane module were obtained to analyze the mass transfer behaviors of bilirubin and bovine serum albumin (BSA), and the effects of tube-side flow rate, shell-side flow rate, and fiber tube length on the bilirubin or BSA clearance rate were studied. The results show that the solute transport mainly occurred in the near inlet regions in the hollow fiber membrane module. Increasing the tube-side flow rate and the fiber tube length can effectively enhance the solute clearance rate, while the shell-side flow rate has less influence on the BSA clearance. The clearance of macromolecule BSA is dominated by convective solute transport, while the clearance of small molecule bilirubin is significantly affected by both convective and diffusive solute transport.

The Karolinska Institute is carrying out two inquiries into an experimental transplant procedure.

Miniature hydrogel compartments in scalable stacked and folded geometries were used to prepare a contact-activated artificial electric organ. Eel-y shocking power source The electric eel can generate electrical discharges of 100 watts to stun prey, but should you X-ray an eel, you wouldn't find a battery pack inside. Instead, thousands of cells called electrocytes are arranged along its body, each producing a small ion gradient and therefore a potential difference across them. Now, Michael Mayer and colleagues have developed a hydrogel-based system that mimics the electrocyte mechanism and could be used as a soft power source for robotics. They arrange sets of ion-selective hydrogels in series to generate ion gradients across a group of four hydrogel droplets. These droplets can either be arranged in series in a microfluidic set-up, or be stacked in parallel by folding up an array of hydrogels using origami principles. The net result is a power source that is able to generate voltages similar to those generated by the electric eel. Progress towards the integration of technology into living organisms requires electrical power sources that are biocompatible, mechanically flexible, and able to harness the chemical energy available inside biological systems. Conventional batteries were not designed with these criteria in mind. The electric organ of the knifefish Electrophorus electricus (commonly known as the electric eel) is, however, an example of an electrical power source that operates within biological constraints while featuring power characteristics that include peak potential differences of 600 volts and currents of 1 ampere 1 , 2 . Here we introduce an electric-eel-inspired power concept that uses gradients of ions between miniature polyacrylamide hydrogel compartments bounded by a repeating sequence of cation- and anion-selective hydrogel membranes. The system uses a scalable stacking or folding geometry that generates 110 volts at open circuit or 27 milliwatts per square metre per gel cell upon simultaneous, self-registered mechanical contact activation of thousands of gel compartments in series while circumventing power dissipation before contact. Unlike typical batteries, these systems are soft, flexible, transparent, and potentially biocompatible. These characteristics suggest that artificial electric organs could be used to power next-generation implant materials such as pacemakers, implantable sensors, or prosthetic devices in hybrids of living and non-living systems 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 .

Soft robotics represents a new set of technologies aimed at operating in natural environments and near the human body. To interact with their environment, soft robots require artificial muscles to actuate movement. These artificial muscles need to be as strong, fast, and robust as their natural counterparts. Dielectric elastomer actuators (DEAs) are promising soft transducers, but typically exhibit low output forces and low energy densities when used without rigid supports. Here, we report a soft composite DEA made of strain-stiffening elastomers and carbon nanotube electrodes, which demonstrates a peak energy density of 19.8 J/kg. The result is close to the upper limit for natural muscle (0.4–40 J/kg), making these DEAs the highest-performance electrically driven soft artificial muscles demonstrated to date. To obtain high forces and displacements, we used low-density, ultrathin carbon nanotube electrodes which can sustain applied electric fields upward of 100 V/μm without suffering from dielectric breakdown. Potential applications include prosthetics, surgical robots, and wearable devices, as well as soft robots capable of locomotion and manipulation in natural or human-centric environments.