Growing human organs in a lab moves a step closer

Growing human organs in a lab moves a step closer

Growing human organs in a laboratory has moved a step closer after scientists developed a structure that can support beating heart muscle.

By Graham Tibbetts
Last Updated: 11:58AM GMT 03 Nov 2008

The non-living material is described as a "scaffold" that is robust enough to hold the organ tissue in place yet is designed to degrade within two months to leave the organ behind.

In the short term scientists will seed the structure with stem cells to grow tissue which can be used to repair damaged hearts.

But in the longer term they hope to be able to produce fully functioning organs from scratch, reducing the need for donors.

Although synthetic scaffolds have been developed for human tissue in the past, this is the first one designed to meet the demands of a pumping heart.

It was created by scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who said it could be adapted to grow tissues for other organs such as the liver and kidney and skin or blood vessels.

Lisa Freed, principal scientist at MIT and Harvard University, said: "In the long term we'd like to have a whole library of scaffolds for different tissues in need of repair. Each scaffold could be tailor-made with specific structural and mechanical properties. We're already on the way to a few other examples."

The team has already succeeded in using the scaffold to grow layers of heart muscle from the stem cells of rats, but human trials have yet to take place.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/health/3371187/Growing-human-organs-in-a-lab-moves-a-step-closer.html