Sofia debates on how she would spend a billion pounds on research

Sofia Celaya asks “You have one billion pounds to spend on research: how you going to spend it?”

 

There are many fields of research in medicine that with appropriate funding could achieve a lot of good, however, one that really sticks out for showing great promise in having the ability to cure millions, but suffering from a lack of funding, is 3D bioprinting. 3D bioprinting is a process mimicking that of 3D printing but rather than using plastics or metals to make their products, they use bioink and biomaterials to create tissue-like structures, from relatively simple ones such as skin or heart valves, to more complex ones such as internal organs, like the heart or kidney. It has the potential to help medics fight against so many diseases and organ-based problems that are currently hard to resolve. Diseases such as pulmonary diseases and heart diseases, or issues such as organ transplant waiting lists could all easily be solved with 3D bioprinting, hence why if given one billion pounds to spend on research, I would spend it on this.

 

One of the biggest health issues that 3D bioprinting would solve is the need for an organ donor and the waiting period it takes to find one. When a patient comes in with a failing or damaged organ, they are put onto an organ transplant list. This list is then looked over by The Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network (OPTN) who decide the order of priority based on severity of illness, age etc. Only when a person reaches the top of the waiting list are they able to receive a transplant, and this can take between 0-5 years, depending on the type of organ being received and whether the OPTN decide they are a match. With the waiting period being so long and without enough donors, a lot of people don’t survive the time it takes for them to get an organ. In the US, for example, around 20 people die a day while waiting for a transplant and towards the end of 2020, there were around 112,000 people who still required a transplant. Even after they receive the organ, there are many other issues to worry about such as the possibility of the patient rejecting the organ; even though rejections don’t happen immediately or in all cases, their prevalence is relatively high in the years following their transplant. Another issue faced by patients with transplants is the effect of anti-rejection medication (immunosuppressants) as although very beneficial, also puts the patient at very high risk from diseases, such as some cancers. 3D bioprinting can solve this issue due to the fact it is patient specific; 3D bioprinting makes organs out of the patient’s own tissue so there would be no need for the anti-rejection medication and the organ would survive in the body for much longer than that of a donor who may not have an 100% compatibility.

FILE PHOTO: Wads of British Pound Sterling banknotes are stacked in piles at the Money Service Austria company’s headquarters in Vienna, Austria, November 16, 2017. REUTERS/Leonhard Foeger/File Photo

 

3D bioprinting is also showing great potential of having the ability to help cure diseases such as heart disease or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). The World Health Organisation (WHO) released a list of the top ten causes of death responsible for almost 55 million deaths worldwide in 2019 and number one on this list was (Ischaemic) heart disease, responsible for almost 9 million deaths (16% of the 55 million deaths worldwide). Coming in third on the list was COPD, responsible for over 3 million deaths. 3D bioprinting aims to change this. This technology could potentially eliminate the disease completely in a much shorter time frame and with the research being done, there are hopes that the technology can change these statistics so the percentage of people dying from heart disease or COPD is lowered.

 

A big problem 3D bioprinting companies meet, however, is with the technology being so complex, a lot of money is needed for all the testing. Over the years, there have been comments from researchers that even though attempts at building a fully functioning organ are still quite a few decades from being achieved, having more funds would undoubtedly help speed up the process. As said by Linda Griffith- director of the Centre of Gynepathology Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)- in an article written in The Guardian: ‘The assays to tell whether bioprinting works are really, really time consuming and expensive’.

The executive vice president (Mikael Renard) of Organovo’s (a medical laboratory whose main area of research is on 3D bioprinting technology) commercial operations, in the same article in The Guardian, said that although the idea of 3D printed organs was still decades away from becoming a reality, more funding would definitely help speed up the process and would help companies to come close to achieving this aim in a shorter timeframe.

A similar problem was faced by TeVido Biodevices in Austin, Texas, where a few years back they were testing breast tissue on mice and believed that in 7 years the technology would be ready to test on humans. Their only issue was getting the technology to the market; they were needing at least $15m in grants, with the majority of the rest coming from other investors and potential partners. The above examples are a few of many instances in where researchers and companies, with the appropriate funding, could make important progress and potentially produce applicable technologies, cutting decades of research than if without.

 

In conclusion, although many different areas of research in medicine could do with one billion pounds, 3D bioprinting is a field of research which has high possibilities of curing or reducing the suffering and death of thousands of people but does not receive nearly as much funding as it deserves. 3D bioprinting offers a solution to the chronic shortage of organ donors by being able to print organs with a patient’s cells and tissues (speeding up the process of waiting for a donor) and also shows promise in the research of curing many grave diseases (improving a patient’s quality of life). Giving one billion pounds to bioprinting companies who are ‘scrambling for money to fund their utopian ambitions’[1]  would help speed research in this field up and in the coming future, 3D bioprinting could become a vital technology in several life-changing medical applications. Who knows, maybe with technology that has the possibilities of printing you a replacement organ in just under two weeks, we can begin to envision a world where people live healthier and longer lives without experiencing the downsides of a weakening body that comes with ageing.

[1] 3D printing human organs – but where’s the money for it? | 3D printing | The Guardian