3D Printing Might Soon Gift Sight To Millions

3D printing has made some questionable stuff possible: for instance guitars, working guns and model foetuses. But it looks like 3D printing is finally coming of age, and in a good way.

More than 15 million people worldwide are in dire need of corneas, the outermost front layer of our eyes. Once a cornea is damaged, either due to disease or injury, the only solution at present is a cornea transplant. And donors are hard to come by. According to statistics published by the University of Iowa, around 44,000 corneal transplants are done every year. Evidently, the supply is far less than the demand.

But 3D printing could give the gift of sight to these millions soon. Scientists from Newcastle University have recently developed what they term ‘bio-ink’. Using this, they could successfully 3D print corneas.

The team of researchers had to figure out a way to make this ‘bio-ink’ stiff yet soft (so that it holds the shape and yet can be squeezed out of the nozzle of a 3D printer). They achieved this by using a combination of alginate and collagen. Once the ink was ready, they used the scan of a person’s eye to measure the cornea’s dimensions and printed the cornea in an ordinary 3D printer!

Once it was printed, stem cells were allowed to grow around the ‘boundary’ provided by alginate and collagen. The good news was more than 80 per cent of cornea cells were alive a week after printing, indicating that with further research and development, these could indeed replace human corneas.

The caveat of course is precisely that further research is needed to ensure that these corneas can do all the work that a ‘real’ cornea does. Scientists are also yet to test it on living organisms. But the positive implications of this development are huge. A genuine game changer, if 3D-printed corneas are successful, they have the potential to dramatically transform millions of lives for the better.