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A new approach to medical 3D printing is set to speed up the production of body-parts.
Scientists have demonstrated the ability to print three-dimensional blood vessels in seconds. If the technique proves scalable, it could revolutionize regenerative medicine.
Imagine being able to recover from a heart attack by replacing your faulty aortic valve with a brand new one, made of your own cells... 
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A team of bioengineers at the University of Washington has developed the first structure for growing small human blood vessels in the laboratory. The vessels behave remarkably like those in a living human and offer a better and much more modular approach to studying blood-related diseases, testing drugs and, one day, growing human tissues for transplant.
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Doctors in Sweden have replaced a vital blocked blood vessel in a 10-year-old girl using the first vein grown in a lab from a patient's own stem cells.
The successful transplant operation, reported online in The Lancet medical journal on Thursday, marks a further advance in the search for ways to make new body parts.
It could open the door to stem cell-based grafts for heart bypass and dialysis patients who lack suitable blood vessels for replacement surgery, and the Swedish team said it is now working with an undisclosed company to commercialize the process.
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Printable blood vessels - that could be useful for coronary bypass, and basic structure of printing replacement organs. There's a lot of hand-waving about using your own cells (where do they come from, what stem cell processes?), but the potential is there.