Five-year-old Ella Kroese needs a new heart.
She was born with a serious heart defect.
Three open-heart surgeries weren't enough to fix it.
Only the right-sized heart with the right blood type will do.
And even though she's in the top-priority category for a transplant, she's been waiting for months.
Thousands of Americans like Ella are on the national waiting list for a new heart, according to the U.S. government.
And even if they get one, their bodies may reject it.
But, what if doctors could manufacture a heart with a patient's own cells using a 3-D printer,
that new machine that makes everything from food to shoes to cars?
If that sounds like a pipe dream, say hello to the BioAssemblyBot.
It's a robot that can already print several parts of the heart.
I can tell the robot printer: build this for us.
This is what we're going to print for you.
Blood vessels, heart valves and the heart's walls -- it can print these parts with living human cells,
and one of its masterminds believes it can print an entire heart within a moon-shot time frame.
And I really think that if we put a large team together, which we are, I think we can get there within 10 years.
Dr. Stuart Williams at the University of Louisville leads the team that's working toward this goal.
And for Williams, the goal is personal.
My dad died of heart disease, and the devices, the instruments that would really have been necessary to keep his heart functioning were not available at that time.
So, it really grew out of a personal vendetta that I had against cardiovascular pathology.
Now, he and his colleagues are pioneers in the field of bio-printing, ...
We're taking biology and making it IT.
...having built a six-axis robot that they say would create a heart right in the operating room.
What would this look like visually? I'm still trying to understand.
You'd press a button, and this thing would actually print a heart? Is that what would happen?
Precisely. That is the plan.
MRI images of a healthy heart would be converted into a digital 3-D model.
Then the patient's own fat would be taken out and converted into the different cells that make up the heart.
We now have these incredible capabilities to take an adult cell and transform it into other types of cells.
Parts of the heart would then be bio-printed piece by piece, and soon you would have a new heart.
How long would it take to print a heart?
The printing of the heart, I believe, could be accomplished in essentially a single day.
Dr. Williams and his team aren't the only bio-printers on the block.
A group at Cornell University has bio-printed a human ear.
Cold collagen gel being deposited onto the warm plate.
What that enables you to get is really sharp edges and really sharp boundaries.
It takes Dr. Larry Bonassar and his team just 15 minutes to print one.
They're pretty robust.
You know, I can pick them up, and they can bend and they can do all the things that normal cartilage should do.
3-D printed ears and other body parts, Bonassar estimates, ...
This is a meniscus.
...could be used in human trials in less than five years.
It brings the ability to make thousands, millions of tissues and to customize them for individual people.
And the heart has one major blood vessel called the left main artery.
And what's stopping us from making better organs, asked Dr. Williams.
Whoever put this original plan together, put one major blood vessel leading into the left side, the major part of the heart.
And when that vessel becomes dysfunctional, we call it "the widow maker."
When that vessel fails, a patient will often die.
So, we can build a new heart based upon a design that has two or three blood vessels, a redundancy in this organ.
Do you sometimes worry that you are playing god, that you're actually creating human beings, parts of human beings?
Well, I don't worry about that, but I certainly hope that this technology can benefit as many people as possible.