Surgeon prints kidney model

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"It's like baking a cake," said Atala of the Wake Forest University in the California city of Long Beach, while demonstrating to his colleagues how the new technology works.

The basis of the groundbreaking technology is a combination of cultured human cells and scaffolding built from organic material, which the human body is unlikely to reject.

According to the Next Big Future, the process involves scanners building a 3D image of the kidney, after which a tissue sample smaller than a postage stamp is used to seed the process, Atala explained.

Popsci reports that initial reports suggested Atala had printed a working kidney, but it was actually a kidney-shaped mould with no internal structures or vasculature, according to Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Centre.