special delivery. A microscope image shows Engineered blood vessels (red) holding cells (green) supplied with the essential nutrients.
S Jordan. Millar
Imagine a world where if your heart or kidneys have failed, you would not have to endure an agonizing wait, perhaps futile for a donor that your body might reject organ . Instead, a doctor would simply take cells from your own body and use them to "grow" you a new body. One of the main obstacles to such tissue engineering has been producing network of tiny blood vessels that hold the newly growing natural tissue alive. But now a new technique, based on the material used by the confectionery industry, may have brought a solution closer.
The cell culture technology has advanced considerably in recent decades to the point where it is now possible for the skin of culture in a laboratory and transplanted to a patient. engineering bladders are now in clinical trials. But the skin and bladders are thin membranes, if transplanted into the body, can be supplied with blood from preexisting vessels. Growing a replacement version of a piece of thick fabric like a heart or a kidney requires the engineering of a network of channels connected in the tissue to act as blood vessels. Without them, the cells inside are deprived of oxygen and nutrients and would quickly die.
Various research groups have attempted to solve this problem. An avenue involved casting molds of blood vessels, then the culturing of tissue around them. The molds must then be dissolved so that the body can function properly. Getting rid of mold is hard to do, however, without killing the living tissue. If the mold was made of rubber, for example, a researcher should use a toxic solvent to dissolve them.
The new study solves this problem by turning to materials used by the food industry. As they report online today in Nature Materials Scientists at the University of Pennsylvania and colleagues have developed a soluble carbohydrate drink water on the basis of a decoration used on cakes and lollipops. The material can be cast into a variety of shapes, is completely non-toxic, and when he did his job, will dissolve naturally in the moist environment of the cells, leaving spaces that can carry blood to the cells.
To test the quality of "blood vessels" products, researchers have grown a piece of cloth made from rat liver cells using their technique. The cells in the center of the tissue remained alive and functioning after the scaffold had dissolved, that vessels successfully carrying blood to the cells, said team member and bioengineer Christopher Chen.
The study is "a useful step in this effort to develop fully functional tissue with blood vessels," said Abraham Stroock chemical engineering from Cornell University, who also works on the blood vessels of the engineering in the fabric using different techniques.
both Stroock and Chen stressed, however, that there is still much work to be done before scientists can even consider becoming new implantable organs . for example, the real organs are not simply pieces of fabric interlaced with blood vessels, but internally structured machines including various types of tissues that work together to do a job. to reproduce this complexity will be a huge challenge, said Chen .
Stroock hope more short-term goals could be achieved, however. He says it may soon be possible to take healthy liver cells in a patient whose liver is failing and use them to make fabrics that would be stored in the laboratory. Although this fabric is not suitable for implantation, it could, said Stroock, make a kind of personalized, living dialysis machine to the patient, as well as being a step towards the goal of producing replacement organs .
0 Komentar