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Monday, May 10, 2004

Growing replacement organs is still a long way off

Back in the late 1990s the isolation of embryonic stem cells had me hoping we might soon be able to grow new replacement parts for people in need of organs for transplantation -- but as so often happens the devil is in the details and it looks like I was hype-notised.

Christine Soares writes in Scientific American: "Thin sheets of skin and single blood vessels have been grown in the laboratory, and some versions have already been put through human clinical trials. Yet any whole organ would be a complex three-dimensional edifice comprising specialized cells, nerves and muscle, all interwoven with a dense web of veins and capillaries diffusing oxygen and nutrients. The main hurdles have been just getting multiple cell types to grow and work in harmony and spurring formation of the blood vessels required to nourish tissues more than a few hundredths of a millimeter thick....

[S]cientists working with stem cells, embryonic or otherwise, admit that they are just beginning to learn tricks for controlling the kind of tissue the cells become and just starting to discern the cues cells give to one another as well as take from their natural environment during the course of organ development."

The upshot is, even if replacement parts won't be appearing in clinics tomorrow, this will be a real possibility in twenty years or so, which is really extraordinary when you think of it, anyway.

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