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DigitalParacosm t1_ixwtrk3 wrote

Reply to comment by RaceHard in Brain cancer vaccine succeeds at prolonging survival in Phase 3 trial by Sorin61

An excellent observation into how our privatized healthcare system robs people of the choice to live.

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RaceHard t1_ixwuamw wrote

One day that will no longer be the case, once 3d printing technology reaches into bioprinting we may yet see true freedom in medical synthesis. Sure it will likely be outlawed but it will also be impossible to regulate much how it is now possible to fully 3d print guns at home. 10 years ago they looked like a joke, nowadays you can barely tell them apart at a glance. In another decade even an expert will have a hard time to know without handling them. Who knows how far the technology will take us.

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DigitalParacosm t1_ixx2thv wrote

And for diseases that won’t be cured by 3D printing: there is gene therapy (like this drug we’re speaking of) and CRISPR.

7 years ago I mentioned medical 3D printing to a general surgeon and he humored me by saying the scaffolding isn’t there yet. It’s more than that though, one key challenge to any implant is your body rejecting and attacking it. Hell, just putting a random person’s actual kidney in your body requires you to be on tacrolimus (oral anti rejection medication) the rest of your life, and if you miss a single day your kidney may fail. We are a long way from dragging and dropping organs, we’re even farther from 3D printing them.

Either way, its entirely irrelevant to this discussion.

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RaceHard t1_ixx7ol9 wrote

A few years ago my computer science professor went on a tangent about a colleague of his working on scaffolding apparently they were working on trying to create an agnostic cartilage material that would be in theory treated with indifference by the immune system. And that onto that material the cells of an organ could be sprayed on. The idea, (and I admit that it was explained in a high concept without details.) was that you would use the healthy liver cells of the subject to in practice grow a new liver. Thereby bypassing Immuno suppressors

That was back in 2016, I am not sure how far along that research currently is. But when we were told about it the outcome was not optimistic until 2030's.

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