an artificial ear transplanted for the first time

An ear implant was grafted from human cells by an American medical team with a 3D printer. “We really enters with 3D bio-printers in the era of custom-made prostheses. The objective here was to reconstruct the pavilion and the lobe of an ear. Because more than one in 10,000 babies born with a rare disease called microtia, that is to say that part of the outer ear, the pavilion, the lobe, does not develop“, explains doctor Damien Mascret on the set of 12/13 Friday June 3. If the installation of a prosthesis is done around the age of 5-6 years, because 80% of the size of the ear that we will have in adulthood is developed at this age, this times the patient was 20 years old.

“3DBio experts first performed a biopsy to remove 1/2 gram of cartilage from the small portion of the patient’s ear. These are its own cells so there is no risk of rejection. Then, the cells that make cartilage were multiplied in culture to obtain billions. Third step : these cells have been mixed with a kind of biological ink based on collagen“, explains the doctor. Finally, this ink made it possible to manufacture the replica of the patient’s correctly developed other ear.