Bioreactors Engineer Tissue To Mend Heart Damage 46
Hugh Pickens writes "Heart attacks usually cause irreversible damage to heart muscle and, because cells lost from the heart do not grow back naturally, leave the organ in a weakened and vulnerable state that may cause another serious condition — called heart failure — if the victim survives. Now a team of scientists led by Tal Dvir from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer-Sheva has developed a tissue-engineering technique, using the body as a 'bioreactor,' to create a 'patch' made from heart muscle that can be used to fix scarring left over from a heart attack. First, a biodegradable 'scaffold' is seeded with immature cells taken from the hearts of newborn rats. For 48 hours, the scaffold is exposed to a cocktail of growth-promoting chemicals in the laboratory and is then transplanted into a rat's abdomen where it develops a network of blood vessels and muscle fibers. After seven days the patch is removed and grafted onto the animal's heart. A month later the patch has completely integrated itself into the heart, synchronizing its 'beat' with that of the surrounding tissue. 'Using the body as a bioreactor to engineer cardiac tissue with stable and functional blood vessel networks represents a significant improvement in cardiac patch performance over ex vivo (outside the body) methods currently used for patch production,' write the authors. The technique is also being developed for livers and bladders."
Re:Just wait (Score:2, Informative)
This research was done in Israel, a country that has (*gasp*) nationalized health care.
Re:Just wait (Score:4, Informative)
Israel doesn't quite have "Nationalized health care" in the way you're claiming.
Israel's system is much closer to the Massachusetts system whereby insurance is compulsory, but multiple organizations still compete for members (they each get a percentage of the national fund equal to their registered percentage of population). Organizational differences (most notably, that the free "minimum care" package provided to all Israelis is not nearly as comprehensive as what Massachusetts demands as a minimum-coverage standard, and most Israelis wind up purchasing "supplemental packages" at increased expense) account for why Israel's system is not failing, whereas Massachusetts's model has gone deeply into the red.
Re:Great (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah yeah, funny. But there's a very serious side to this joke. Where *are* all these cells going to come from? Well, it looks like the answer is just about here - YOU! [time.com] See, scientists are rapidly unlocking the code behind what is a "stem cell" and are able to reprogram them to be whatever you want them to be.
In the (near!) future, you may be able to regenerate heart tissue, liver tissue, or (in my case) new teeth, simply by taking a small skin scraping, culturing the cells, reprogramming them into stem cells, or into whatever type of cell is actually needed - teeth, heart, liver, or whatever.
The resulting tissue could then be surgically implanted with zero risk of rejection, since they are cells from your own body, with your DNA/RNA and so on!
This is a brave new world that includes (at last!) a cure for Type I Diabetes, Parkinsons, heart disease, bad teeth, and too many other illnesses to name.
For example, there was a cure for Diabetes YEARS AGO called the Edmonton Protocol [wikipedia.org] that had the unfortunate side effect of requiring hundreds of donor cadavers. I was, for a while, intensely excited (one of my oldest sons is Type 1 Diabetic) but the donor cadavers does present just a *bit* of a problem.
But suddenly, now, donors aren't a problem. If I need islet cells, I can donate a bit of skin tissue! Or even have a liposuction!
This isn't big. This isn't huge. This is world-changing.
Re:Great (Score:3, Informative)
It would be world changing, but it certainly isn't in the near future. It's a scaling problem: any human-useful structure is hundreds of grams of tissue. Even with exponential growth, stem cell labs have trouble producing single digit grams of cells, let alone intact tissues of millimeter thickness.
This stuff works pretty well in mice and rats - ectopic formation and vascularization of muscle has been known for years - because those animals are small enough that useful tissue can get its initial nutrition by diffusion. Think 100 microns, paper-thin. To generate a human-useful tissue replacement, you'd need to start with a vascularized construct, and that's a long way off. We'll get there, but I think we're as far from stem-cell mediated tissue replacement as the Wright brothers were from the moon.