A printed or lab-grown organ works in a person for a year

Take a few of a person's own cells, grow them on a scaffold shaped like the organ, and put the result in. In 2006 a North Carolina group reported seven young people with bladders made this way, working for years. Nothing more complicated than a hollow organ has been done, and printed organs with their own blood supply remain in the laboratory. The entry is written to count working organs, not patches: skin, cartilage and blood vessels grown from cells are already approved, but they replace a surface or a tube, not an organ's job.

What would count

An organ built outside the body from living cells, with or without a printed scaffold, is placed in a person and does that organ's job for at least a year, in a peer-reviewed report. Organ here means a bladder, kidney, liver, heart, lung, pancreas, windpipe, oesophagus or length of intestine; skin, cartilage, cornea and blood vessels are counted as tissues and left out.

Who settles it: Peer-reviewed reports with follow-up of a year or more; a regulator's approval record if an engineered organ is approved

Where it stands

First human. Reached on 15 April 2006, on the record of doi.org. Could move a stage within 5 to 20 years.

The last reading

Once a week every upgrade is read against the news, against what would count above. Open a line to see what that week held. Every reading of this upgrade is on this week's reading.

• 16 October 2026 Nothing new

  Nothing in the window. The one approved human trial of a printed body part found (3DBio's ear) is cartilage, which the test leaves out; printed lung scaffolds are in animals. The engineered bladders of 2006 remain the record.

Notes

The record is the 2006 Lancet report of engineered bladders in seven patients followed for up to five years. The charter asked whether the 2006 bladders or the 2022 printed ear settle a different rung: the bladders settle first human; the printed ear (a company announcement with no peer-reviewed report) is cartilage, not an organ, and would not count under the test even if published. A lab-grown blood vessel was approved by the United States regulator in December 2024, which is the closest an engineered part has come to in clinical use, and is left out by the test for the reason given in the description. The later synthetic windpipe cases of the 2010s were found to be fraudulent and do not count.