An interesting suggestion raised by a commenter on the article:
It's not what they're doing, but what could be
done; living cell arranged in such a controlled way could easily build replacement organs or even limbs, opening a whole new field in medicine and giving hope to thousands.
This is a really neat possibility. We aren't exactly lacking hamburgers in the world, so once the meat-printing tests move forward, if this 3D printing of bio-material becomes cheaper and more accessible, we could possibly print 'real' human muscle or skin etc. that could be used in replacement of skin grafts on burn victims for example.
Also perhaps in the more distant future the chance to print entire limbs of people to transplant on. The medical appplications of 3D bio-printing is the direction I can see this heading. Very cool stuff.
We were doing it back in 1999 at UW. You don't need to 3d print it - you need to lay down a lattice made of fiber small enough that the cells don't see it as foreign material. Don't see it as foreign material? It doesn't reject. Lattices of nanofiber laid over burns would grow skin in some trials - not scar tissue, which is devoid of follicles, pores or any other functional dermal structures, but good, pure, epidermis. The fact that we were there in 1999 and you still haven't seen it commercially should say something about the difficulty of bioengineering.