http://news.bbc.co.uk/low/english/sci/tech/newsid_265000/265713.stm
January 29, 1999
Doctors herald grow-your-own organs
Internal organs grown in the laboratory have been successfully
transplanted into animals for the first time.
The achievement heralds a new era in tissue engineering and transplant
medicine in which patients could receive new
organs made of their own cells.
Six dogs received new bladders constructed in the laboratory from cells
multiplied from small samples of their original
bladders. Only one month after the transplants the new organs looked and
performed normally.
Even more encouraging was the fact that the "neo-organs" performed
normally for another 10 months.
Being able to grow replacement organs to order has been a major goal for
nearly two decades. The successful team is
based in the Laboratory for Tissue Engineering at the Children's
Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston,
Massachusetts.
Speaking to BBC News Online, team leader Dr Anthony Atala said: "We're
excited about the technology.
"Other organs have challenges of their own but our work shows us a
glimpse of what awaits in the future."
Professor Karl Kadler of Manchester University hailed the work as an
extremely exciting development.
"This is a rapidly expanding field - one of the fastest - and bigger
advances still will come with the use of stem cells," he
said.
The Boston team first took a biopsy of cells from the bladders of 11
beagles. They then cultivated the muscle cells and
special bladder skin cells, called urothelial cells, for four weeks.
The cells were then fixed onto a polymer ball, the size and shape of a
beagle's bladder.
The muscle cells were placed on the outside, the urothelial cells on the
inside. Each layer of cells added was bedded
down on the polymer by placing the artificial organ in an incubator.
When the artificial bladder was large enough, the dogs had their natural
bladders replaced with the lab-grown ones.
The dogs urinated through catheters for up to a month to allow the new
organ to adapt. After that the dogs were able
to pass water normally.
'That's amazing'
Dr Christian Lorenz, of the University Hospital Mannheim, told BBC News
Online: "It's an important step.
"To show that you can co-cultivate the two types of cells on a scaffold
and that it then works in vivo - that's amazing."
He believes that if the experiments can be repeated in larger numbers of
animals, then the method might well be used
for humans.
Dr Lorenz said the only uncertainty was whether all the cells in the
artificial bladder came from the "neo-organ".
Fragments of bladder cells left in the dogs after their natural bladders
were removed may have multiplied and added to
the new organ.
The problem driving this type of research, and that of artificial organs
and xenotransplantation - transplants between
species - is the lack of donor organs available and the difficulties of
rejection.
About 400 million people suffer from bladder disease worldwide and many
would benefit from a transplant.
The research was published in the journal Nature Biotechnology.
--
Judith Richards, London, Ontario, Canada
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