Lab-grown Kidneys Transplanted Into Rats 55
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)."
As a kidney transplant recipient ... (Score:2, Interesting)
The liver will be one of the first lab-grown organs to be transplanted because the liver is a very simple organ. Nearly all cells of the liver do exactly the same thing.
But the kidney is a very complex organ that has a variety of glands and structures that perform different tasks. The kidney performs the following:
1. Clean waste material from the blood
2. Retain or excrete salt and water
3. Regulate blood pressure
4. Stimulate bone marrow to make red blood cells
5. Control the amount of calcium and phosphorous absorbed and excreted
Dialysis does only a few of these functions (1,2 and 5) and it does them very poorly. When on dialysis I was constantly fatigued and was having increased blood pressure issues. Since my transplant my life has been restored to normal. But one day that transplanted kidney will die. I just pray that it lives until the day that a story like this changes medical science.