Have you ever looked at your veins? At how delicate and complex they seem? Researchers in Germany aren’t too impressed with them because they have developed a system for printing blood vessels using a 3D printer! Of course, the technology is in its early stages, but the mere possibility of being able to print human organ tissue is exciting and, at the same time, creepy.

A 3D printer is used to print a substrate map of blood vessels and multi-photon polymerization, with the help of a laser, allows the creation of polymers on this substrate map. More simply, the 3D printer provides the simple base for creating blood vessels because printers aren’t that precise. A very powerful laser is directed at specific areas of this base, creating more complex structures. The end result is a blood vessel that, although synthetic, contains enough specialized material that allows it to interact with a patient’s natural organism.

The technology is still in its early stages and hasn’t actually been put to the test. Regardless, the German researchers are very upbeat about what they have accomplished. Rather than using a 3D printer to create a piece of plastic, they have used a 3D printer to create something that has the potential to save millions of lives. Nobody would have predicted 3D printing of blood vessels just a few short years ago. Who knows? Maybe we’ll see full organs being printed in the not too distant future.