http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443816804578002101200151098.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
Need an artery for bypass surgery or custom cartilage for that worn-out knee? Hit Print. Some researchers are experimenting with techniques that build human tissue using patients' own cells. In about a dozen major university and corporate laboratories, biomedical engineers are working on ways to print living human tissue, in the hope of one day producing personalized body parts and implants on demand. Still far from clinical use, these tissue-engineering experiments represent the next step in a process known as computerized adaptive manufacturing, in which industrial designers turn out custom prototypes and finished parts using inexpensive 3-D computer printers
Neat, and very different from the method of stripping the cells off a tissue scaffold and populating with a patient's own cells.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/16/health/research/scientists-make-progress-in-tailor-made-organs.html?pagewanted=all
or populating an artificial scaffold
Two and a half years ago doctors in Iceland, where Mr. Beyene was studying to be an engineer, discovered a golf-ball-size tumor growing into his windpipe. Despite surgery and radiation, it kept growing. In the spring of 2011, when Mr. Beyene came to Sweden to see another doctor, he was practically out of options. “I was almost dead,” he said. “There was suffering. A lot of suffering.” But the doctor, Paolo Macchiarini, at the Karolinska Institute here, had a radical idea. He wanted to make Mr. Beyene a new windpipe, out of plastic and his own cells.
