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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)."
Nope, my liver is fine. Its my kidneys that are fucked up.
By the way: this technique may be cross-organ applicable.
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
We do this already. Not the fertilizer thing (at least, not primarily, but I'm all for being buried in a cardboard box and turning into mulch), but the organ transplant thing. Now we've got a hack to bypass biological DRM. Better not let the MPAA hear about it.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
The price of bacon may also go down, win win.
Not for the pig.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
The price of bacon may also go down, win win.
Not for the pig.
Yeah, well, the pig should've thought about that before deciding to taste so damn delicious.
I watched a BBC documentary this past year, the host of which sought to find out what "long-pig" tastes like. He went to a doctor and had his leg biopsied, then cooked the biopsy. However, he said he couldn't eat it due to UK law, so he took it to a lab, which placed the sample in a GCMS and told him what it would it taste like: a combination of mostly pork, plus poultry and lamb, if I remember correctly. I have little doubt he was willing to eat it, though, as this bloke drank his own piss during the same series.
Thank you, Edward Snowden.
"Arguments from authority are worthless." —Carl Sagan
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.
The Internet King? I wonder if he could provide faster nudity.
This would seem to imply to me that it would not be impossibly difficult to grow a new liver in a lab. All you have to do is hook into the self-regeneration properties and take advantage of them.
You don't need a lab. You can take half of someone's liver, put it in someone else, and both will grow and function.
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.
Indeed. There's already been some impressive research into using the intercellular matrix from pig intestine as a healing scaffold - the most dramatic case that I remember was a while back seeing a picture of a foot of someone with a diabetic ulcer that had eaten away a couple toes back partway through the arch. No established medical technique had been able to heal the wound, and I think amputation of the entire foot was beginning to be seriously considered. Then they slapped a sheet of i.i.c. matrix over it and it healed completely in I think a week or so - that is it skinned over and didn't come back. Sadly the toes didn't regenerate, that wouldv'e been *awesome*, but we're not quite there yet.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I, for one, wonder when rats became our new overlords. How come they can get new kidneys, be cured of baldness and diabetes, cloned, have intelligence and memory increased, etc.. When can I do to get this preferential treatment?
But then have to deal with the rejection problems in the recipient. The promise of lab-grown ones is that you strip the donor's cells leaving only the scaffold thereby removing anything they would reject and seed it with the patient's own cells which they won't reject.
Diabetic rats everywhere are now rushing for kidney transplants.
for rats.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
I can tell you that it is stories like this that I look for everyday. Transplanted kidneys suffer the same fate as all transplanted organs. My immune system will eventually find a way to get around the immuno-suppressive drugs I am always on and kill the kidney as it would any foreign cell in the body.
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.
We should learn what we need to know about issues, before we decide what we need to feel about them.