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Article Archive Published: March 2011The Big Idea: Organ Regeneration

Miracle Grow

In the future people who need a body part may get their own

backregrown in the lab from their own cells.

By Josie Glausiusz

Photograph by Rebecca Hale, NGM Staff

Above: The synthetic scaffold of an ear sits bathed in cartilage-producing cells, part

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of an effort to grow new ears for wounded soldiers.

More than 100,000 people are waiting for organ transplants in the U.S. alone; every

day 18 of them die. Not only are healthy organs in short supply, but donor and

patient also have to be closely matched, or the patient's immune system may reject

the transplant. A new kind of solution is incubating in medical labs: "bioartificial"

organs grown from the patient's own cells. Thirty people have received lab-grown

bladders already, and other engineered organs are in the pipeline.

The bladder technique was developed by Anthony Atala of the Wake Forest Institute

for Regenerative Medicine in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Researchers take

healthy cells from a patient's diseased bladder, cause them to multiply profusely in

petri dishes, then apply them to a balloon-shaped scaffold made partly of collagen,

the protein found in cartilage. Muscle cells go on the outside, urothelial cells (which

line the urinary tract) on the inside. "It's like baking a layer cake," says Atala. "You're

layering the cells one layer at a time, spreading these toppings." The bladder-to-be is

then incubated at body temperature until the cells form functioning tissue. The

whole process takes six to eight weeks.

Solid organs with lots of blood vessels, such as kidneys or livers, are harder to grow

than hollow ones like bladders. But Atala's groupwhich is working on 22 organs

and tissues, including earsrecently made a functioning piece of human liver. One

tool they use is similar to an ink-jet printer; it "prints" different types of cells and the

organ scaffold one layer at a time.

Other labs are also racing to make bioartificial organs. A jawbone has sprouted at

Columbia University and a lung at Yale. At the University of Minnesota, Doris Taylor

has fabricated a beating rat heart, growing cells from one rat on a scaffold she made

from the heart of another by washing off its own cells. And at the University of

Michigan, H. David Humes has created an artificial kidney from cells seeded onto asynthetic scaffold. The cell-phone-size kidney has passed tests on sheepit's not yet

implantable, but it's wearable, unlike a dialysis machine, and it does more than filter

toxins from blood. It also makes hormones and performs other kidney functions.

Growing a copy of a patient's organ may not always be possiblefor instance, when

the original is too damaged by cancer. One solution for such patients might be a stem

cell bank. Atala's team has shown that stem cells can be collected without harming

human embryos (and thus without political controversy) from amniotic fluid in the

womb. The researchers have coaxed those cells into becoming heart, liver, and other

organ cells. A bank of 100,000 stem cell samples, Atala says, would have enough

genetic variety to match nearly any patient. Surgeons would order organs grown as

needed instead of waiting for cadavers that might not be a perfect match. "There are

few things as devastating for a surgeon as knowing you have to replace the tissue and

you're doing something that's not ideal," says Atala, a urologic surgeon himself.

"Wouldn't it be great if they had their own organ?" Great for the patient especially,

he means.

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