In the medical field, the application of 3D printing technology is increasing. The birth of 3D printed prostheses, artificial bones and 3D printed pills has created more possibilities for patients to recover as soon as possible. In recent years, more and more researchers regard 3D printed skin as a new research direction and have made great progress.

Skin transplantation is one of the main methods to repair damaged skin in surgical treatment. Timely and effective wound closure has always been a difficult problem in clinical treatment of severely burned patients. Exploring the corresponding skin transplantation technology is one of the important research fields of burn medicine. At present, the clinical treatment of skin transplantation can accelerate the healing of damaged skin, but inevitably, the layer covering the damaged skin will still fall off, and most of them are "robbing Peter to pay Paul" treatment methods. The transplanted skin can not be well combined with host cells, which is also a major problem faced by burn department and plastic surgery. How to better install implants on the wound surface of damaged skin? This new study may have an answer.

Researchers at Rensselaer Institute of Technology use 3D printing technology to bio-print complete vasoactive skin. The result of this study is an important step to create a more natural skin transplantation method for human beings, and human transplant rejection (one of the main factors affecting the survival of grafts) is expected to be improved.

However, the current achievements of the research team can not be completely called mature technology, but it is feasible. If this technology is to reach the level of clinical use, researchers need to make further efforts. The current version of 3D printing technology needs to use CRISPR technology for gene editing to modify donor cells, so as to integrate blood vessels and be accepted by patients.

In the short term, this technology can be used to help patients with stress ulcers or diabetes. For patients with pressure ulcers, 3D printed active skin is undoubtedly the most perfect solution. Ulcers usually occur in different parts of the body and can be treated with small pieces of skin. For diabetic patients, the wound healing time is usually longer than that of normal healthy people, so this technology is also helpful to accelerate wound healing.

However, for those patients with severe burns and scalds, it may take some time to use this technology for skin transplantation. These injuries usually lead to the loss of nerve and vascular endings. Transferring 3D printed skin to these damaged tissues is more complicated, so the research team must overcome the difficulties.

The various "pipeline" networks contained in the human body are like porters. They bring all kinds of nutrients to our organs and remove waste from them. From the point of view of 3D printing technology, these networks are complex and difficult to reproduce perfectly. However, there is still a long way to go from animal testing to clinical application. We expect and imagine that this advanced medical technology will benefit more patients in the future.