Will we ever... grow organs? (BBC)
In June 2011, an Eritrean man entered an operating theatre with a cancer-ridden windpipe, but left with a brand new one. People had received windpipe transplants before, but Andemariam Teklesenbet Beyenes was different. His was the first organ of its kind to be completely grown in a lab using the patient's own cells.
Beyenes windpipe is one of the latest successes in the ongoing quest to grow artificial organs in a lab. The goal is deceptively simple: build bespoke organs for individual patients by sculpting them from living flesh on demand. No-one will have to wait on lengthy transplant lists for donor organs and no-one will have to take powerful and debilitating drugs to prevent their immune systems from rejecting new body parts.
The practicalities are, as you can imagine, less straightforward. Take the example I have already described. The process began with researchers taking 3D scans of Beyenes windpipe, and from these scans Alexander Seifalian at University College London built an exact replica from a special polymer and a glass mould. This was flown to Sweden, where surgeon Paolo Macchiarini seeded this scaffold with stem cells taken from Beyenes bone marrow. These stem cells, which can develop into every type of cell in the body, soaked into the structure and slowly recreated the mans own tissues. The team at Stockholms Karolinska University Hospital incubated the growing windpipe in a bioreactor a vat designed to mimic the conditions inside the human body.
Two days later, Macchiarini transplanted the windpipe during a 12-hour operation, and after a month, Beyene was discharged from the hospital, cancer-free. A few months later, the team repeated the trick with another cancer patient, an American man called Christopher Lyles.
Macchiarinis success shows how far we have advanced towards the goal of bespoke organs. But even researchers at the cutting edge of this area admit that decades of research lie ahead to overcome all obstacles.
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more: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120223-will-we-ever-create-organs