Advantages and Disadvantages of BioPrinting

The major benefit of bioprinting is simple; saving lives. By utilizing new technology, bioprinting will be able to reproduce vital human organs that will reduce, or eliminate the need for donors, as well as recreate other important body parts, making surgery far simpler. Preserving human life is a huge boon to society, raising life expectancy and reducing the amount of terminal patients. This benefit extends into the testing departments of much new upcoming advancement. For drug development, it will allow a lot more testing to be done, decreasing the amount of time and monetary costs for a new drug to be pushed onto the market for public use. 

The costs of bioprinting are quite high financially; a basic, prototype machine was priced at around $200,000, which is an exorbitant sum that not every medical centre can afford. Bioprinting is not cheap, and will mostly be only available to the wealthy echelons of society for quite some time. Also, until further research and development takes place, creating complex, full organs is out of the question, as the body may reject the foreign implementation, wasting time and effort. The time it takes to create a complex and expensive process prototype liver, as of 2012, is well over one week; some people do not have the time to wait for new technology to further speed up the time.