Private company Auxilium Biotechnologies successfully prints kidney and liver tissues on ISS
The private company Auxilium Biotechnologies today announced it has successfully printed kidney and liver tissues as well as manufactured 28 nerve implants during a recent mission on ISS.
During the mission, Auxilium’s AMP-1 orbital bioprinter successfully manufactured kidney, liver, and cartilage tissues while also producing 28 nerve repair implants. The achievement represents the first demonstration of kidney tissue manufacturing in space, the first demonstration of liver tissue manufacturing in space, and the first mission to manufacture three distinct tissue types during a single spaceflight. The production of multiple tissue types and clinically relevant nerve repair implants represents the first demonstration of a scalable, multi-product biomanufacturing platform in space.
Equally important, the mission demonstrated the ability of a single autonomous manufacturing platform to produce both living tissues and implantable medical products during the same flight. The simultaneous production of multiple tissue types alongside 28 nerve repair implants highlights not only the versatility of the platform, but also its scalability and higher-throughput manufacturing in space.
Because NASA forbids the manufacture of any products on ISS for sale later, this experiment by Auxilium is merely a demonstration of the technology. The company however already has a deal to do this work on Vast’s space stations, and appears in negotiation with the Starlab space station as well. Once those private stations launch, it is now certain that Auxilium will rent space on those stations to begin production and sale of these medical products.
In other words, these space stations have a growing and viable customer base, outside of NASA and the government.
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It sounds as though these folks are within spitting distance of being able to make entire transplantable organs. If they can do so at low enough prices, the PRC may find its kill-to-order business in giblets harvested from murdered political prisoners drying up. The PRC would then have to revert to just killing these people rather than parting them out for spares. One more cut in the death-by-a-thousand that will do in the PRC.