Within the next ten years it’s likely that damaged organs will be replaced with ones grown in vats.
University of Minnesota researchers have successfully created a rat heart from the cells of a baby rats. Subscribing to the principle of using nature’s own building blocks, the researchers were able to grow a living, beating rat heart in the laboratory within two weeks. Researchers removed cells from a dead rat heart, leaving the organ’s infrastructure and valves, and injected heart cells from baby rats.
The vat-grown hearts were transplanted into unrelated rats, were not immediately rejected, and began to operate normally—including developing a blood supply and regular beat. The cells from the donor hearts even began to reline the blood vessels. Researchers hope the anti-rejection drugs would only need to be used temporarily.
The research indicates that an individual’s bone marrow stem cells can be used to grow a human heart by placing the cells in a cadaver heart’s infrastructure. Doris A. Taylor, the team lead, told the New York Times that the process is applicable to other organs as well. The research “opens the door to this notion that you can make any organ: kidney, liver, lung, pancreas—you name it and we hope we can make it.” Taylor also noted “the principle problem in escalating it to humans is one of scale, not cell biology, and that is an easier problem to solve potentially.”
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