- [Narrator] The human body is as remarkable as it is complex.

(figure gasps) But sometimes things go wrong.

(figure gasps) (heart beating) Like major injuries- (bricks clattering) (floor rumbling) Or cancer- (bricks scraping) - [Figure] Oh, no!

Help!

- [Narrator] Or even organ failure.

(bricks clattering) Our bodies just can't keep up.

But imagine with a few blocks here, and a few cells there, you could build your way to healing.

Well, that's "All Science, No Fiction."

(gentle music) (3D printer whirring) Sometimes the tools of advanced medicine are illuminating.

Like this 3D printer that prints with light.

(gentle music) OHSU research assistant Anthony Tahayeri has to balance the formula perfectly to get the result he wants.

- You have a liquid that it has a little bit of chemistry in it such that when light hits it, it activates the chemistry.

And it allows what material is liquid to solidify.

- [Narrator] What comes out of the printer is tiny, but strangely familiar.

- These ones are 2x8 Lego-like scaffold.

- [Narrator] These Lego-like bricks could revolutionize how we heal major bone injuries.

Imagine this is your newly shattered femur, with a big chunk of bone completely missing.

Now imagine that surgeons could patch you up by simply snapping a few blocks together to fill in the gaps.

- There's no satisfying click like a regular Lego but they will stick together.

This is the part that...

This is so nerve-wracking just because of how far into the experiment you are.

Hmm.

There we go.

- Back in the day, the surgeons would introduce like metal rods or something like that if you were trying to treat these really large bone defects.

But here we have a scaffold that is biodegradable.

And not only is it biodegradable, it is also contributing to the regeneration of the tissue.

- [Narrator] The blocks play only a small role in actual healing.

Their main job is to act as a holding tank for another product of the 3D printer.

- You can sort of see just a whole bunch of flowers.

- [Narrator] These translucent jello-y blobs are called hydrogels, or microgels when they're really tiny.

- Each microgel is a miniature tissue, with about 1,000 cells trapped in there.

And they're all going to interact with their environment.

- [Narrator] Eventually, these microgels will be made of stem cells, a type of cell that hasn't really decided what it wants to be.

- Come on.

- Stem cells can become blood cells, muscle or even bone cells.

- [Anthony] Okay, here we go.

- [Narrator] And you can tell the stem cells what to transform into simply by changing what's around them, in this case, by changing the stiffness of the 3D-printed microgel.

Think of it as regular jello versus a jiggler.

- So if you were to put a stem cell on a soft surface, it would become a softer tissue cell like brain or fat.

And if you were to put it on something that's hard, it would automatically become a stiffer cell like bone.

- [Narrator] Even the shape of the microgels matter.

Athirasala has discovered that flower shapes are ideal for making bone cells.

And if you can deliver them, in the stackable blocks, to the exact right spot, they could give the body a headstart on healing.

- [Avathamsa] Just by customizing or tailoring the stiffness, the geometry, we can get regeneration to happen way faster.

- [Narrator] Healing major injuries is one level of sophistication, but the researchers in this Portland lab are taking things much, much further.

- The idea of playing God a little bit with building living body parts.

It's just so remarkable, right?

Like the the ability of creating parts of tissues and organs that actually do things that, you know, only nature is able to create, to me, has always been fascinating.

- [Narrator] Their work could bring a new understanding of diseases like cancer.

- [Luiz] We can give a very clear and fresh understanding of how these diseases actually happen in a way that was impossible before.

- [Narrator] The impossible is now possible because of a 3D printed technology dubbed "organ on a chip."

(bell dings) (gentle music) - [Anthony] This is a mold for a blood vessel that we will form, about the thickness of a human hair.

(bell dings) (sparks crackling) (bell chimes) It activates the surface of the chemistry, they become just glued together.

(sparks continue crackling) (bell dings) - [Christiane] Just like this.

(bell dings) - [Narrator] In what feels a little bit like mitochondrial magic, the cells come together to create bone and blood vessel tissue in the small cavities of the chip.

- It is gonna be an engineered bone, it mimics the characteristics of bone in such a way that the cells perform as if they were in the body.

- [Narrator] With the chip, they can then do all kinds of new experiments, including seeing exactly how the tissue responds when it's exposed to an invading hoard of cancer cells.

- How can we do that in humans?

We don't have a window for the human body.

We cannot open that and put a microscope and get the patient walking with a microscope.

- [Narrator] Using this window to see how human cancer cells interact with human tissues outside of an actual human gives the researchers far better access to investigate how cancer spreads.

And with that window into a specific person's body, we enter the bonkers new world of highly personalized medicine, meaning if every person is different, shouldn't treatments be as well?

The idea for cancer would be to take a biopsy and grow a patient's unique tumor cells on dozens, maybe even hundreds, of these 3D printed chips.

Instead of trying just one type of chemotherapy in a patient, just to find out it doesn't work months later, you can test different drug combos on each chip to see what works best- (triumphant music) Quickly getting to the best possible treatments for each individual person, increasing their chances of survival.

(bell dinging) - You can actually democratize a lot of this medicine because theoretically you can actually take patients that will never get access to the fancy medicine that is happening in the big cities.

We can recreate parts or biology that are specific to patients in remote populations, in low income populations.

And then it's almost like you have a twin of that patient in the lab.

- [Narrator] The Bertassoni lab is making great strides in healing bone, understanding cancer and personalizing treatment, though the technology is still mostly in the early testing phases.

But perhaps the most mind-boggling work is happening in this lab.

- So it's not the easiest to see.

But you can see that there's a little clump there at the bottom.

Those are all of my cells.

So there's about a million cells in that little pellet.

- [Narrator] Using a specialized 3D printer and video game controller, PhD Student Haylie Helms has devised a way to print one teeny-tiny cell at a time, opening the door to build entire pieces of the human body with a precision never before achieved.

- The field doesn't currently exist.

I am the beginning of the field with my team.

- [Narrator] This cell-by-cell printing technique is at the cutting edge of biofabrication, that's building with biology.

At this early stage, Helms is using the technology to study cancer.

Loaded into her printer today, it's a cartridge of prostate cancer cells.

But the potential of her technique is even more astounding.

- The most amazing thing about science is that there's an element of surprise, you know, that is so remarkable that Eureka moment, the breakthrough that we're all going after.

- [Narrator] Precision single-cell printing may prove to be a little pocket-sized "Eureka."

They believe being able to replicate a given organ, cell by cell by cell, will allow us to 3D print complex organs that will work in people, a challenge many labs around the world are tackling.

- So the goal with this is to be able to actually print full organs that have the proper functionality because the cells are arranged in the same way you would find them in the body.

- [Narrator] But the difference between printing a few individual cells and printing an entire organ is huge.

- [Luiz] Can you put three or four cells, 4 million times, right?

Which is really what it would take to build an entire liver.

- [Narrator] The impact would be astounding.

- If you walk into a hospital and say, "I have liver failure, I need a new liver."

"Wait a minute, I'm gonna print you a liver," and you bring a liver that is specific for that patient and replace that.

Then, again, you change medicine forever.

- [Narrator] And with the next great leap forward, we could be building our way to a healthier future.

(gentle music) Members are the beating heart of OPB's great programs, like "All Science, No Fiction."

Thanks.

And don't miss out on all the coolest and most inspiring science the Northwest has to offer by subscribing to OPB Insider at opb.org/allscience.

- Yeah, I like it.