United Therapeutics Corporation, a public benefit corporation co-headquartered in Silver Spring, announced that in partnership with 3D Systems Corporation (NYSE: DDD) it has produced the world’s most complex 3D-printed object – a human lung scaffold – and demonstrated it at the LIFE ITSELF Conference that occurred May 31 to June 3, 2022 in San Diego. The event was organized and hosted by Dr. Sanjay Gupta and Marc Hodosh and was sponsored by CNN, United Therapeutics, and other prominent corporate leaders in healthcare.
Per the press release: Dr. Martine Rothblatt, United Therapeutics’ Chairperson and Chief Executive Officer and Chuck Hull, 3D Systems’ Co-Founder, Executive Vice President, and Chief Technology Officer for Regenerative Medicine, explained to conference attendees during a presentation entitled What’s the Future of Organ Transplantation? that these 3D-printable lung scaffold designs consisted of a record 44 trillion voxels that lay out 4,000 kilometers of pulmonary capillaries and 200 million alveoli. Scientists at United Therapeutics plan to cellularize these 3D-printed scaffolds with a patient’s own stem cells to create tolerable, transplantable human lungs that should not require immunosuppression to prevent rejection.
