Skin Printer: It Heals Wounds Just Like In Fifth Element!

The sci-fi genre wouldn’t be the same without the movie Fifth Element. It’s such a bizarre yet awesome movie that leaving it out of existence would be nothing less than ludicrous. It’s based on so many movies, but also has become the basis for so many other movies. It’s an unlikely box office mega movie that raked in over $263,000,000 when released back in 1997. There is a scene in there where Lee-Loo gets assembled from recovered DNA. It’s a fine sci-fi invention, but at the time not even near possible, but times change and so does technology.

The brilliant folks over at Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine showed off their latest invention at the American College of Surgeons Clinical Congress. It’s a machine that prints skin cells to a wound very much like an ink jet printer. Previously, the process to quickly heal critical wounds was to use skin grafts from other places of the patient’s body, but no more.

It prints living tissue cells into the wound which will quickly start to coagulate. The wound still needs time to heal, but the process is much less painful and much less complicated than using skin grafts. According to the researchers, this invention opens up new possibilities to treat wounded soldiers on the battle fields, and it also helps patients with skin diseases that needs repairing.

I am just blown away by the ingenuity that people keep coming up with. It’s like the sci-fi days that we saw in movies not too long ago, and that we thought were just the imagination of a producer or director, are finally coming true. Simply awesome!

Via: [Technology Review]