3D printers have been around for a few years now. They work by printing a structure in layers, one on top of the other, to form complex 3D shapes. Now James Yoo at the Institute of Regenerative Medicine at Wake Forest University in North Carolina, US, says he can do the same thing with living cells. Yoo uses a standard inkjet printing mechanism to create layers of viable cells, which can then be built into 3D structures. He says the structures may comprise of several different types of cells, just as conventional image printers use several different colours of ink.
