3D printers are doing amazing things. They’re creating “mini body organs,” producing prosthetics, building houses and printing human skin. This groundbreaking technology, specifically in creating mini body organs and human skin, is making huge strides in the effort to abolish laboratory animal testing.
Carolina Catarino, a Brazilian scientist whose trials utilize 3D printed skin to advance cruelty-free research, just won the 2017 Lush Prize awarded for innovations in the fight against animal testing. While earning a Biomedical Engineering degree, Catarino had an internship at L’Oreal in Paris, where she worked with lab grown skin. Traditional animal tests begin with a piece of an animal, but the cells aren’t as complex as human skin cells, so Catarino’s goal is to create a more accurate model of human skin. She is also adding proteins (which sustain the skin), multiplying the cell quantity to observe how sunlight affects them, and increasing blood vessels that will help create skin grafts and can be utilized for regenerative medicine.
The most important part of Catarino’s work is that she incorporates hair follicle structures in the skin models. Most current tests can’t accurately determine what a substance will do when it enters the follicle holes. This is where 3D printing comes in. Catarino is able to place the cells precisely where she wants the bioinks (cells and other biologics in a pattern mimicking living tissues and organs) that contain the scaffold and cells to create the follicle structures.
Human skin produced by a 3D printer also has potentially life-changing medical uses for burn victims and people with scars. Catarino’s work, which improves a research model, illustrates that 3D printers are catapulting scientific studies into a new era – one in which animal testing is a thing of the past. Vive la science!
What’s New…
VAMOS PARAR DE EXPLORAR OS ANIMAIS,NÃO SÃO NOSSOS E SIM DO PLANETA.
If animal testing could be eliminated wouldn’t that be wonderful!
A miracle ?? ????????Sooner rather than later!! No animal should be tested, it’s horrendous. ????????????????
This is great news.news for the world of science absolutely love the idea of no more animal testing. That’s just another way to torture animals in the name of science. Don’t figure how they can say that the tests run on animals can deliver same results for the human body parts. Their have different gene and cells would generate differently anyway. Just another way to line someone else’s pockets. Need to stop
I am thrilled to know that progress has been made towards the elimination of animal experimentation, something I have been totally against since childhood. This is really good news. My new hero- Carolina Catarino. Bev- you are so right about the abuse of primates, its inexcusable and so evil.
I am thrilled to know that progress has been made towards the elimination of animal experimentation, something I have been totally against since childhood. This is really good news. My new hero- Carolina Catarino. Bev- you are so right about the abuse of primates, its inexcusable and so evil.
Brilliant.
Very innovative. Anything we can to stop animal testing is ay ok by me.
There is no reason at all for animal testing. There are so many ways to test things without using beautiful animals. They werent put on this earth for experiments.
Excellent
I ABSOLUTELY LOVE THIS IDEA! I KNEW WITH THE TECHNOLOGY WE HAVE TODAY THAT WE DON’T NEED TO DO ANY ANIMAL TESTING! EXCERPTS FROM PETA: Research shows that 90 percent of primates in laboratories exhibit abnormal behaviors that are caused by the physical abuse, psychological stress, social isolation, and barren confinement that they are forced to endure. Many go insane, rocking back and forth, pacing endlessly in the cages, and engaging in repetitive motions such as back-flipping. They even engage in acts of self-mutilation, including tearing out their own hair or biting their own flesh. Babies born in laboratories are forcibly torn from their screaming mothers and permanently separated from them—usually within three days of birth. Numerous investigations have found that in order to abduct primates from their homes in the wild, trappers often shoot mothers from trees, stun the animals with dart guns, and then capture the babies, who cling, panic-stricken, to their mothers’ bodies. In laboratories, these animals have barely enough room to sit, stand, lie down, or turn around. The rich days full of sensory stimulation that they should be experiencing are replaced by days that are devoid of color, scent, and almost every other type of environmental enrichment. Maternal-deprivation experiments: These unbelievably cruel studies began more than five decades ago when Harry Harlow infamously pulled baby primates away from their mothers, giving them only rag dolls or noxious wire “mothers” as substitutes. Even though we know the negative implications of separating babies from their mothers, similar experiments are conducted today at places such as the National Institutes of Health, Oregon National Primate Research Center, Wake Forest University, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the University of Washington, where infant monkeys are torn from their mothers in order intentionally to cause psychological trauma and examine the harm that results. https://www.peta.org/issues/animals-used-for-experimentation/primates-laboratories/