Lab-grown Kidneys Transplanted Into Rats

ananyo writes with this bit about lab grown organs from Nature: "Scientists at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston have fitted rats with kidneys that were grown in a lab from stripped-down kidney scaffolds. When transplanted, these 'bioengineered' organs starting filtering the rodents' blood and making urine. The team, led by organ-regeneration specialist Harald Ott, started with the kidneys of recently deceased rats and used detergent to strip away the cells, leaving behind the underlying scaffold of connective tissues such as the structural components of blood vessels. They then regenerated the organ by seeding this scaffold with two cell types: human umbilical-vein cells to line the blood vessels, and kidney cells from newborn rats to produce the other tissues that make up the organ (paper)."

Re:Fuck kidney

[Andrio]

When it comes to body parts, the liver is second only to the brain in complexity. It's not just about detoxifying stuff as a lot of people think. It performs some 500 functions throughout the body. It touches virtually every metabolic process in your body, in some way. So complex is it, it's the only organ in humans that is capable of self-regeneration. As little as 25% of one can regrow into a whole liver. The fact that it was deemed worthy of regenerative abilities compared to all other organs in the body is a testament to its importance.

So yeah, take care of your liver.

Not the revolution you are looking for.

[MassiveForces]

The printing of cells into organs using inkjet technology, and biological/artificial scaffolds is not new. Yes it's nice that they were able to start with just a particular scaffolding and a bunch of cells and turn it into an organ that functions, but this isn't the real challenge in regenerative tissue engineering.

The cells they chose were from the same type of organ from newborns, therefore there was a large number of stem cells in that particular mix which were already programmed to develop into a new kidney anyway.

The biggest problem is getting cells from your patient, then turning them into stem cells, and then setting them off with some sort of signal or series of signals to develop into a given tissue type. This avoids many host rejection problems and ethics considerations. It would also be useful in in-vitro lab work. For example, I am trying out scaffolds to see if I can get certain cell lines to differentiate into something that better resembles the functionality and complexity of lung tissue. If I could do that, we could reduce experimenting on animals to find out the effects of inhaling pollutants and so on.