{"id":215850,"date":"2025-06-13T06:22:27","date_gmt":"2025-06-13T11:22:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/06\/algorithm-streamlines-vascular-system-design-for-3d-printed-hearts"},"modified":"2025-06-13T06:22:27","modified_gmt":"2025-06-13T11:22:27","slug":"algorithm-streamlines-vascular-system-design-for-3d-printed-hearts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/06\/algorithm-streamlines-vascular-system-design-for-3d-printed-hearts","title":{"rendered":"Algorithm streamlines vascular system design for 3D printed hearts"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/algorithm-streamlines-vascular-system-design-for-3d-printed-hearts2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>There are more than 100,000 people on organ transplant lists in the U.S., some of whom will wait years to receive one\u2014and some may not survive the wait. Even with a good match, there is a chance that a person\u2019s body will reject the organ. To shorten waiting periods and reduce the possibility of rejection, researchers in regenerative medicine are developing methods to use a patient\u2019s own cells to fabricate personalized hearts, kidneys, livers, and other organs on demand.<\/p>\n<p>Ensuring that oxygen and nutrients can reach every part of a newly grown organ is an ongoing challenge. Researchers at Stanford have created new tools to design and 3D print the incredibly complex vascular trees needed to carry blood throughout an organ. Their platform, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.science.org\/doi\/10.1126\/science.adj6152\" target=\"_blank\">published<\/a> June 12 in <i>Science<\/i>, generates designs that resemble what we actually see in the human body significantly faster than previous attempts and is able to translate those designs into instructions for a 3D printer.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe ability to scale up bioprinted tissues is currently limited by the ability to generate vasculature for them\u2014you can\u2019t scale up these tissues without providing a <a href=\"https:\/\/medicalxpress.com\/tags\/blood+supply\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">blood supply<\/a>,\u201d said Alison Marsden, the Douglas M. and Nola Leishman Professor of Cardiovascular Diseases, professor of pediatrics and of bioengineering at Stanford in the Schools of Engineering and Medicine and co-senior author on the paper. \u201cWe were able to make the algorithm for generating the vasculature run about 200 times faster than prior methods, and we can generate it for complex shapes, like organs.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There are more than 100,000 people on organ transplant lists in the U.S., some of whom will wait years to receive one\u2014and some may not survive the wait. Even with a good match, there is a chance that a person\u2019s body will reject the organ. To shorten waiting periods and reduce the possibility of rejection, [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1489,1902,11,41,269],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-215850","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-3d-printing","category-bioengineering","category-biotech-medical","category-information-science","category-life-extension"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215850","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=215850"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215850\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=215850"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=215850"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=215850"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}