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Five-year-old Ella Kroese needs a new heart.

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She was born with a serious heart defect.

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Three open-heart surgeries weren't enough to fix it.

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Only the right-sized heart with the right blood type will do.

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And even though she's in the top-priority category for a transplant, she's been waiting for months.

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Thousands of Americans like Ella are on the national waiting list for a new heart, according to the U.S. government.

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And even if they get one, their bodies may reject it.

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But, what if doctors could manufacture a heart with a patient's own cells using a 3-D printer,

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that new machine that makes everything from food to shoes to cars? 

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If that sounds like a pipe dream, say hello to the BioAssemblyBot.

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It's a robot that can already print several parts of the heart.

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I can tell the robot printer: build this for us.

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This is what we're going to print for you.

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Blood vessels, heart valves and the heart's walls -- it can print these parts with living human cells,

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and one of its masterminds believes it can print an entire heart within a moon-shot time frame.

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And I really think that if we put a large team together, which we are, I think we can get there within 10 years.

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Dr. Stuart Williams at the University of Louisville leads the team that's working toward this goal.

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And for Williams, the goal is personal.

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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.

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So, it really grew out of a personal vendetta that I had against cardiovascular pathology.

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Now, he and his colleagues are pioneers in the field of bio-printing, ...

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We're taking biology and making it IT.

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...having built a six-axis robot that they say would create a heart right in the operating room.

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What would this look like visually? I'm still trying to understand.

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You'd press a button, and this thing would actually print a heart? Is that what would happen?

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Precisely. That is the plan.

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MRI images of a healthy heart would be converted into a digital 3-D model.

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Then the patient's own fat would be taken out and converted into the different cells that make up the heart.

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We now have these incredible capabilities to take an adult cell and transform it into other types of cells.

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Parts of the heart would then be bio-printed piece by piece, and soon you would have a new heart.

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How long would it take to print a heart?

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The printing of the heart, I believe, could be accomplished in essentially a single day.

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Dr. Williams and his team aren't the only bio-printers on the block.

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A group at Cornell University has bio-printed a human ear.

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Cold collagen gel being deposited onto the warm plate.

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What that enables you to get is really sharp edges and really sharp boundaries.

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It takes Dr. Larry Bonassar and his team just 15 minutes to print one.

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They're pretty robust.

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You know, I can pick them up, and they can bend and they can do all the things that normal cartilage should do.

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3-D printed ears and other body parts, Bonassar estimates, ...

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This is a meniscus.

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...could be used in human trials in less than five years.

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It brings the ability to make thousands, millions of tissues and to customize them for individual people.

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And the heart has one major blood vessel called the left main artery.

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And what's stopping us from making better organs, asked Dr. Williams.

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Whoever put this original plan together, put one major blood vessel leading into the left side, the major part of the heart.

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And when that vessel becomes dysfunctional, we call it "the widow maker."

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When that vessel fails, a patient will often die.

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So, we can build a new heart based upon a design that has two or three blood vessels, a redundancy in this organ.

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Do you sometimes worry that you are playing god, that you're actually creating human beings, parts of human beings?

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Well, I don't worry about that, but I certainly hope that this technology can benefit as many people as possible.