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Tissue engineering, what is it? It’s an emerging field, interdisciplinary field that combines engineering and life sciences to create functional biological structures that can restore and improve tissue function. Examples include bladders, trachea blood vessels and if you look at it, printing as a technology has also gone through the revolution and well it’s been around for hundreds of years. In the last couple of decades, it’s been a new dimension. We can now print layer by layer in materials ranging from plastic to metal, to concrete, to chocolate, from the smallest scales to the largest. If you take 3D printing and we combine it with biology, we have bio-printing where the building blocks our cell aggregates where we called bio-ling particles that are composed of thousands of cells that can fuse together into different shapes. These geometries can include multi-layered sheets, such as skin, branching tubes for vasculature and the sophistication of this manufacturing technology improves daily to include different cell types and different shapes. And now why is it important, the pharmaceutical industry at the moment is in a moment of crisis. It spends more money each year on R&D, but has fewer drugs to show for it. It takes more than a decade, more than a billion of dollars to develop a new drug and the cost of a failure can be measured in hundreds of millions of dollars.

The fossil record rarely preserves embryos and juveniles, but ichthyosaurs, as marine animals, had better chances due to their environments. Holzmaden, Germany, features exceptional ichthyosaur fossils, including many with preserved embryos, suggesting repeated use of the site for birthing. The remarkable preservation quality raises questions about the concentration of pregnant females and young in this specific area.