Breakthrough as Scientists Grow Kidney in Laboratory

Breakthrough as scientists grow kidney in laboratory
BY:HANNAH DEVLIN
From:The Times
A WHOLE functioning kidney has been grown in a laboratory for the first time, offering hope to thousands of dialysis patients - and it could pave the way for livers, lungs, kidneys and hearts to be made to order.
Organs successfully implanted into rats were created by removing living kidney cells from a "donor" rat kidney leaving behind the organ's tough collagen scaffold.
US scientists then injected a mixture of rat kidney and blood-vessel cells into the scaffold and grew the entire organ in culture. After two weeks, the bioengineered kidney was able to filter blood passed through it and began producing urine.
When the kidneys were transplanted into rats that had had a kidney removed, they were shown to function, although not as effectively as a normal kidney.
Harald Ott, a surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital. who led the study published today in the journal Nature Medicine, said: "If this technology can be scaled to human-sized grafts, patients suffering from renal failure who are waiting for donor kidneys or who are not transplant candidates could theoretically receive new organs derived from their own cells."
It could solve the shortage of donor organs and overcome the problem of organ rejection. Patients given normal kidney transplants must take drugs to suppress their immune systems for the rest of their lives. The ultimate aim would be to create new organs using a patient's own stem cells, making it less likely to be rejected.
The demand for kidneys is far higher than supply. In Britain in 2011 there were 1020 living donations and 1667 taken from recently deceased people. This left just under 7000 people on the waiting list.
Scientists hope that a functioning organ could be produced using a patient's stem cells - the body's so-called master cells that are able to turn into different cell types. The scaffold could be created using kidneys from dead donors, which would not need to be functioning or match the patient's blood group or tissue type.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/breakthrough-as-scientists-grow-kidney-in-laboratory/story-fnb64oi6-1226620820364