Plug and play bone repair

Bone takes a long time to grow and repair, so treating serious damage or carrying out reconstructive procedures can be a slow and painstaking process. However, Jake Barralet of the faculty of dentistry at McGill University in Montréal, Québec and Uwe Gbureck of the department for functional materials in medicine and dentistry at the University of Würzburg, Bavaria and their colleagues have developed a method for 'printing' artificial bone from the same chemical components as living bone using a modified ink-jet printer.¹ Their approach allows them to include the biomolecules needed to trigger blood-vessel growth in the artificial material to allow it to be incorporated into living bone after it has been grafted. The printer can be used to print directly layer upon layer of artificial bone for quick-fix grafts used in reconstructive surgery.