Organs can now be regenerated

NORTH CAROLINA – There may be hope for patients with diseases that put them on waiting lists for new organs. Scientists at Wakeforest University in North Carolina have successfully grown bladders in Petri dishes from Patients own cells, making the chance that the body will reject the transplanted organ almost non-existent. The first patient that the procedure was successful on was 16-year-old Kaitlyne McNamara of Haddam Neck, CT. McNamara was born with spina bifida, a birth defect which stunts brain and spinal cord development, she’s had dozens of surgeries because of the defect, but when it was realized that her bladder wasn’t working properly, something had to be done.Scientists grew a new bladder from McNamara’s own cells, which were then transplanted back into her body. Dr. Anthony Atala of Wakeforest University and his colleagues described the experiment as a long-term success for McNamara and seven other patients, whose ages ranged from toddlers to teenagers. The patients in Atala’s study all have spina bifida, which puts them at risk for kidney damage which results in problems with urinary control. The conventional way to repair the condition is to use a piece of intestine to create a new bladder. This previous technique is described as being dangerous. “When you put a piece of intestine to function as a bladder, you start having absorption of things you shouldn’t be having, and this may lead to problems with bone growth, mucus production, certain metabolic problems … even cancer,” Atala said in a CNN interview. In the new practice, doctors extract bladder and muscle cells from the patient’s own bladder. The cells are then grown in a Petri dish, and then layered onto a three-dimensional mold shaped like a human bladder. In a few weeks, the cells produce a new bladder, which is implanted into the patient. Within a few more weeks, the new bladder has grown to normal size and has started functioning.Atala and his team are now working to grow 20 different tissues and organs, including hearts, livers and blood vessels in the University laboratory. “We’re not using any type of stem cell population or cloning techniques, but mainly the patient’s own cells that we’re using to create these organs and put them back into the patient,” Atala told CNN, “Because the bladders are grown from a patient’s own cells, there is no risk of rejection, as in a traditional transplant”More research will be conducted before growing replacement organs becomes the practice, but Atala said the procedure may eventually help relieve shortages of organs available for transplant. “Over the last decade, the number of patients that actually ended up on the wait list for an organ transplant increased threefold, and in the same time period the number of transplants remained basically flat,” Atala said to CNN. “So a lot of these regenerative medicine technologies do hold some promise in at least making a dent in some of these shortages.”