Crossover Technology: Printing Skin Grafts

This is a pretty neat idea.  This technology, still under
development, promises to enable the printing of skin grafts.  It
uses a technology similar to inkjet printers:

href="http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-04/cell-fabricator-prinks-healing-flesh-burn-victims">Inkjet
Cell Fabricator Prints Healing Flesh Directly Onto Wounds

Popular Science

By Stuart Fox

04.09.2010



As if fabricating a new heart from scratch wasn't impressive enough,
the doctors at the Wake Forest Institute of Regenerative Medicine have
come up with another astounding breakthrough. This time, they've
designed an inkjet printer-like device that sprays new skin cells onto
damaged burn tissue like it was a cheap tan. This device provides a
fast alternative to delicate skin grafts, and could eventually be used
to close other kinds of wounds as well...



...In initial tests on wounded lab mice, burns treated with the cell
printer healed in two weeks, compared with the usual five weeks skin
grafts take to heal. Additionally, the mice with the printed-on skin
showed less scarring and more hair regeneration, as the sprayed-on stem
cells better incorporated themselves into all the various cell types of
the burned flesh...

This builds upon an old idea.  For decades, it has been possible
to spray individual cells in a very fine stream.  That is part of
the technology used in href="http://biology.berkeley.edu/crl/flow_cytometry_basic.html">flow
cytometry.  Flow cytometry uses a single stream of
cells.  It would be very slow to build anything with that.