We will ‘grow’ all organs to order in future, says pioneering
surgeon
by Jeremy Laurance
Patients might one day be able to grow their own organs to replace
diseased or damaged body parts – offering a potential solution to the
global donor shortage crisis – one of the world’s leading transplant
surgeons says today.
Professor Paolo Macchiarini, who pioneered the first transplant of a
whole organ grown from a patient’s own cells four years ago, said the
technology of regenerative medicine had advanced to the point where it
was possible to contemplate transplants with no human donors, no
problems of rejection and no need for lifelong treatment with
immuno-suppressive drugs.
The new technique involves the creation of an artificial “scaffold” –
which could in future be made from animal organs that have been stripped
of their living cells – into which the patients own stem cells are
inserted. The cells then grow to create a fully functioning organ ready
for transplant.
“Such an approach has already been used successfully for the repair
and reconstruction of complex tissues such as the trachea, oesophagus,
and skeletal muscle in animal models and human beings,” Professor
Macchiarini said.
“Guided by appropriate scientific and ethical oversight, [this] could
serve as a platform for the engineering of whole organs and other
tissues, and might become a viable and practical future therapeutic
approach to meet demand after organ failure,” he added.
Although such predictions have been made before, they have been given
added impetus by Professor Macchiarini’s own work. In 2008, he and his
team transplanted a trachea into a 30-year-old woman in Barcelona grown
from her own cells. Claudia Castillo had contracted TB which had damaged
her windpipe and left her unable to breathe.
In her case the trachea was taken from a donor, stripped of all its
living cells and reseeded with cells taken from Ms Castillo’s bone
marrow before being grown in a “bioreactor”.
In a second operation carried out at Great Ormond Street Hospital,
London, in 2010, a British team assisted by Professor Macchiarini
performed a similar operation on a 10-year-old boy, who had been born
with a narrow windpipe.
In his case the donor trachea was transplanted into his chest as soon
as it had been reseeded with stem cells taken from his bone marrow,
using his own body as the bioreactor.
The Independent
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