When I first started the course I mistakenly believed that being an entrepreneur is easy, it only takes a good and innovative (I then did not fully understand the meaning of the word) idea and a sound business plan to start a business that was doomed to succeed. Well, if being an “experimental” entrepreneur requires so much time and effort, I can only imagine how much more difficult it gets when your money and future is at risk.

What I realized while working on developing my business idea is that thinking and acting as an entrepreneur really put me out of my comfort zone. It was very challenging for me to control every aspect of the business creation as I am used to and it was at times scary to not have a clear strategy on how to turn my idea into a successful venture. Throughout my academic career at Baruch I was taught that if I studied the given material well enough and passed all the tests I would succeed in the business world no matter what. What I wasn’t taught was how to make decisions and hold responsibility for my actions. One of the main lessons that I’ve learned in this class is that entrepreneurship involves a lot of decision making and personal responsibility, but it is crucial to reach out to and talk to people that have the information, experience and knowledge that you are missing. Understanding the complexity of the 3D printing technology and creating a viable executive summary would be impossible for me without sharing my experience with my classmates and receiving constructive criticism from my professor (thank you!) as well as having amazing field trips to NRI and Fat Cat Fab Lab.

I have always considered my attention to detail and research skills as one of my main strengths in the academic setting. These qualities proved to be just as important in the business creation. While shaping my initial idea and preparing the executive summary and final pitch, I thoroughly researched the industry, target market and competitors, trying to understand how viable my idea was. With every piece of information my initial idea transformed and I took a slightly different direction in my researched and what I have learned from this experience is that you shouldn’t be afraid of changes.  The first idea that comes to your brain is not always the best idea, it is necessary to take all the available information and all the advice and comments you can get into consideration and shape it into a sound and viable business.

After this course, I grew more confident in my desire to start my own business one day, and I am sure that, when the time comes, I will be more prepared for the challenges that may come my way.

Throughout the course of the semester I attempted to explore an extremely complex but also incredibly fascinating area of 3D printing – bioprinting. When choosing the theme of my blog posts I had three main criteria in mind: it had to be a subject area of 3D printing that I knew very little about, I had to be personally interested in the subject, and I had to understand why this particular area is so significant. As I mentioned in my first “blog expert” post, medicine, its past, present and future, has always been discussed when I was growing up and part of me wanted to explore the new 3D bioprinting technology and share this knowledge with my family. I was also aware of the organ donors’ shortage and felt like the emergence of bioprinting gave us a promise that one day people won’t have to wait in line for transplant organs and millions of lives will be saved around the globe.

In my blog posts I tried to answer two main questions that bioprinting provoked in me. First of all, what changes will bioprinting bring to us? Will they be positive or negative? And how close doctors and scientists are to actually performing the first 3D printed organ transplantation? In my “blog expert” post #2 I compounded a table in which I summarized pros and cons of bioprinting. After performing thorough research and analysis I came to the conclusion that opportunities that bioprinting offers outweigh the potential damage of its misuse. The ability to reproduce body organs will not only save millions of lives by providing patients with organs that are made from their own cells thus dramatically reducing the risk of their rejection, but will also eliminate the black market for transplant organs – these are just a few advantages of bioprinting. In my blog post #4 and #5 I gathered information on the most recent advances in the industry as well as researchers’ estimates on how long it will take to actually develop the first 3D printed functioning organ ready (and safe!) to be transplanted. It turns out that bioprinting is currently at its research and development stage and it will take another decade or so (researchers estimate that by 2030 bioprinting will be a multimillion dollar industry) to see the first results and hear the news about the first successful operation.

Although I tried my best to answer the initial questions I had, I concluded my research with more questions than answers. When thinking about the implications of bioprinting for the world’s population, one can’t but dwell on how differently we will perceive our own bodies when limbs and organs are available to be printed on demand. Will that make us less human? Will it contradict our religious beliefs? Will bioprinting turn doctors and scientists into creators? How much regulation will be needed and how will it be reinforced? Those and many more are the questions are still left to be answered and something tells me that we might find the answers sooner than we expect.

Despite the advances in creating bio-artificial and 3D-printed organs and a few cases of their successful application that I talked about in my previous blog, it is my conclusion that Bioprinting today is primarily at its research and development stage. Indeed, organs need to be designed using the CAD software, then built with bioprinters, then a trial procedure needs to take place that may or may not be a success. If the initial operation is successful, the patient needs to be observed over a quite substantial period of time (say 5-10 years) until it will be proven that such operations can act as alternatives to traditional methods.

According to the article 3D Bioprinting Market 2014-2030, the bioprinting market will progress gradually over the coming decade and the focus is likely to shift from research to commercialization by the second half of next decade. At this stage, applications such as drug testing and tissue engineering will likely be popular. Researchers predict, that by 2030 3D bioprinting will be a multi-billion dollar industry; early success of bioprinted organ transplants is likely to provide additional boost in subsequent years.

There is quite a number of start-ups both in the United States and in Europe, that are developing products based on bioprinting. For example, a Dutch start-up led by scientist Ingmar van Hengel, along with his team, is developing a technology they call SkinPrint. SkinPrint will use a 3D bioprinter in combination with the latest stem cell technology to develop personalized skin that could change the face of medicine as we know it. Here you can watch the SkinPrint’s presentation at the Philips innovation award:

Another examples of 3D bioprinting specialized start-ups are TeVido BioDevices – an “early-stage life sciences/biotech company using 3D bio-printing of a woman’s own living cells – to build custom grafts for breast cancer reconstruction (http://tevidobiodevices.com) and Aspect Biosystems that focuses on printing tissue models for toxicity testing (http://aspectbiosystems.com).

It is very difficult to give a definite estimate as to when we can expect functioning organs to be finally produced and ready to be transplanted. The main challenge facing tissue engineers is being able to create the necessary vascular structure to supply organs with nutrients and oxygen through the blood flow, so they can thrive and survive in the long term. For example the heart requires an entire vascular tree, which is comprised of large blood vessels that branch into smaller and smaller vessels. According to the article Advances in bio-artificial and 3D-printed organs posted on the European Commission’s official website, Stuart William, executive and scientific director of the Cardiovascular Innovation Institute (US), suggests that scientists will be able to print fully functional hearts from a patient’s own cells within 10 years.  The reasons to believe that it is possible truly exist – in the first half of 2013 researchers printed and implanted a portion of a heart and blood vessels in mice.

Dr. Atala, whom I mentioned numerous times throughout my blog, and his research team at Wake Forest University were able to built artificial urethras for five boys using the patients’ own cells between March 2004 and July 2007. The transplanted urethras remained functional throughout the six-year follow-up period.  Thus, it has been proven that bio-artificial urethras can be used successfully in patients and could be an alternative to the current treatment, which has a high failure rate.

Another advancement in Bioprinting particularly in personalised prosthetics has been reported in Belgium in 2012. LayerWise, a Belgian metal parts manufacturer, successfully printed a jaw bone utilizing 3D technology, that was implanted into a 83-year old patient. Organovo successfully prints small pieces of blood vessel or liver tissue. Printing bigger objects and more complex structures is still a big challenge, but the company is on the right track, as the mini-vessels and  mini-livers can perform most functions of the real organ.

In my next blog I would like to talk about commercializing of Bioprinting and discuss issues arising from the insufficient funding in the industry. Although Organovo is one of the most successful (now also publicly traded) commercial 3D printed tissue and organs researcher and producer, it is extremely difficult for the company to keep up with their costs – Organovo’s revenues doubled to $1.2m between 2010 and 2012 but the company’s losses increased nearly eight-fold to $9.3m in the same time period.

After reading through numerous articles and actively following the progress in bioprinting  I can actually imagine, how in the future (maybe a few decades from now) we will all have our full body MRI scans done and stored in case there is a need to replace a failing organ or substitute a limb. Before an operation the doctor would examine our file and his team would print out a functioning organ, perfectly fit for our individual body on the cell level as well as shape wise. In my next blog I will talk about the current stage of bioprinting development and try to estimate when we can actually expect the first fully functioning body organ to be produced. In this blog, I would like to talk about some of the crazy ideas that might well become the reality sooner than we expect.

Crazy Idea #1- Cells printed directly onto the human body.

Imagine how great it would be if doctors could scan patients’ wounds, take tissue samples and then spray on layers of cells to heal the wound rapidly. According to Explaining the Future (explainingthefuture.com), Dr. Anthony Atala (whom I mentioned in my first “Blog Expert” Post) and his team of bioprinting researchers have already developed a skin printer. Their initial experiments on mice were successful with the wounds healing in just 2-3 weeks after being sprayed on, compared to 5-6 weeks in control group.

Crazy Idea #2 – Bioprinters repairing organs inside the human’s body

If one day we will be able to insert functioning 3D printed organs in our bodies, why not think further and imagine having a robotic surgical arms enter our bodies, repair the damage and quickly fix the point of entry on the way out ? I recently watched a futuristic movie called Transendence that has an episode very similar to the scenario I described earlier.

Crazy Idea #3 – Face Printers

We are always in search of infinite youth. Bioprinting offers truly incredible possibilities of its cosmetic application. What if we could scan our face when we are young and then “renew” it a few years later using the old 3D file? But what if we could upload a file from the internet and have someone else’s face printed on ours? To me, this possibility sounds scary and unnatural and I believe that there will have to be a lot of regulation in place to protect people from identity theft of a new level.

Many of us find the idea of being able to print body organs (or even living creatures!) scary. When I first started researching the topic I kept thinking about Frankenstein and all the terrible things that could happen if the technology was misused. However, bioprinting can potentially save millions of lives and improve our quality of living. In this blog post I will summarize some of the pros and cons of bioprinting.