Vaccines from the printer are almost a reality

At the Wired Science conference on health issues held in New York, the famous Craig Venter said that he imagines a future in which it will be enough to download software to prevent infection, synthesize a vaccine on a "bioprinter" and inject it to patients.

Currently, Venter's group, together with a geneticist, is already testing an experimental version of such a digital biological converter. The developers claim that it will take less than 24 hours for the new gadget to create a new vaccine, which will allow timely prevention of epidemics of deadly diseases, such as the H1N1 influenza virus, which claimed many lives in 2009.

Venter is not a pioneer in the field of "printing" biological objects. Researchers have already attempted three-dimensional printing of blood vessels, organs, and even hamburgers.

However, the implementation of this futuristic approach in practical healthcare is a very difficult issue. Venter explains that all email users receive a lot of spam. If you mistake an American Express account for spam and delete it, it will only worsen your credit history, but if you download, print and inject a deadly virus presented as a vaccine, it can have much worse consequences. Perhaps the introduction of "printable" forms of life into practice will stimulate the development of more advanced spam filters or software for checking e-mail.

If Venter bioprinters are widely used, their functioning should be provided with highly effective protection against errors, since even a small change in the structure of the molecule can endow the protein with completely unexpected properties.

Evgeniya Ryabtseva
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru based on Wired Science: Craig Venter Imagines a World with Printable Life Forms.

31.10.2012