Back in 1999, I wrote about medical research on beagles designed to understand the problems with creating and transplanting artificial organs. Last month the researchers involved in that work announced they are now seeking regulatory approval to try out their methods in human beings.
Researchers at the Laboratory for Tissue Engineering at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School took bladder cells from six beagles. They then grew the bladder cells around a plastic form that mimicked the shape of the dogs’ bladders. Once the organs were fully formed, they transplanted the bladders into the dogs. After about three months, these newly grown bladders were fully functional. The dogs were monitored for more than a year with no problems emerging.
Now, Dr. Anthony Atala of Boston Children’s Hospital says he has applied to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for approval to try this technique in human beings. Atala believes he will obtain such approval before the end of the year.
Atala will reproduce the experiment with the beagles, only this time growing a human bladder and transplanting it into a human whose bladder has been destroyed due to disease.
If that succeeds, Atala believes the sky is the limit as far as the applications for tissue engineering. “I think over time there will be no limit,” Dr. Atala told the BBC. “I think it is just a question of figuring out all the different tissue types and cell types and how they work best, but eventually I think that following the same strategies just about every organ in the body will be repairable at the very least.”
Longer term this could reduce the number of people who are on waiting lists for organ transplants, though Atala says he doesn’t believe that his technique will ever be able to completely replace organ donations. Instead it will be yet another tool that doctors will have to treat human disease.
Source:
Lab-built bladders on the way. Pallab Ghosh, The BBC, February 15, 2002.