At UCLA, it's medicine 2.0

Tucked deep in the basement of UCLA’s Center for the Health Sciences is a room that looks more like an inventor’s fantasy workshop than the medical research facility it is. Tables are piled high with tools, electronics, prototype equipment parts and a few stray robotic arms. Posters on the wall describe pending projects in dense technical language with accompanying photos of futuristic devices. This hidden space is where scientists are working at the very forefront of technological advances in medicine. Its assemblage of smarts, parts and computers is contributing to an emerging era of personalized, tech-enabled health care treatment and medical research that challenges our imaginations. Cool inventions like replacement bones and inexpensive DIY plastic hands, fingers and other prosthetics are now being created on 3-D printers like the ones at UCLA for a fraction of the cost of traditional versions. And 3-D bio-printing is being used to regenerate skin, blood vessels, tracheal splints and heart tissue. Somewhere, a researcher is working to 3-D-print a heart, while another is trying to “print” functioning human kidneys. At UCLA, the work toward turning these sci-fi explorations into reality is taking place in the Center for Advanced Surgical and Interventional Technology (CASIT). Through CASIT, surgeons interact with biomedical engineers to lay the foundations for new clinical interventions. CASIT facilities include the Gonda Robotic Center, a telecommunications center...
Source: UCLA Newsroom: Health Sciences - Category: Universities & Medical Training Source Type: news