As we have posted before, organ replacement by
simply regrowing your own is working. The
battle is won and it is now time to go over into the hot pursuit mode. Every tissue type can be identified and it
can be grown. What remains is the
engineering.
If we do this, then several years of effort and
solution delivery will end almost all disability issues once and for all. This will end the massive drain of society
that it all represents.
I do think that most fundamental problems are now
worked artound.
Artificial
human ear grown in lab
By
Helen Briggs
31
July 2013 Last updated at 05:48 ET
US
scientists say they have moved a step closer to being able to grow a complete
human ear from a patient's cells.
In
a new development in tissue engineering, they have grown a human-like ear from
animal tissue.
The
ear has the flexibility of a real ear, say researchers at Massachusetts General
Hospital in Boston.
The
technique may one day be used to help people with missing or deformed outer
ears, they believe.
Tissue
engineering is a growing field in medical science, where substitute organs are
made in the laboratory in the hope of using them to replace damaged ones.
“Start
Quote
This
research is a significant step forward in preparing the tissue-engineered ear
for human clinical trials”
Dr
Thomas CervantesMassachusetts General Hospital
The
US research team is working on artificial living ears to help people born with
malformed ears or who have lost them in accidents or trauma.
Previously
the researchers had grown an artificial ear, the size of a baby's, on a mouse.
In
the latest development, published in the Journal of
the Royal Society Interface, they took living tissues from cows and sheep
and grew them on a flexible wire frame that has the 3D shape of a real human
ear.
This
was then implanted into a rat whose immune system they had suppressed enabling
the ear to grow.
"We've
demonstrated the first full-sized adult human ear on the rat model," Dr
Thomas Cervantes, who led the study, told BBC News.
It
was significant for several reasons, he said.
"One
- we were able to keep the shape of the ear, after 12 weeks of growth in the
rat. And then secondly we were also able to keep the natural flexibility of the
cartilage."
Titanium
scaffold
The
cells were grown on a titanium wire scaffold that is modelled on the dimensions
of a real human ear, taken from CT scans.
The
new work shows that in theory it is possible to grow up enough cells - at least
in animals - to make a full-size human ear.
"In
a clinical model, what we would do is harvest a small sample of cartilage, that
the patient has, and then expand that so we could go ahead and do the same
process," said Dr Cervantes.
"This
research is a significant step forward in preparing the tissue-engineered ear
for human clinical trials."
He
said he expected that the process could move into human clinical trials in
about five years.
Other
research into bioengineered organs is progressing fast.
About
a dozen patients have received transplants of artificial wind pipes coated with
stem cells taken from either the patient or a donor.
Meanwhile,
a kidney grown in the laboratory has been transplanted into a rat, where it
started to produce urine.
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