The Body Shop - Research Review

The article, "The Body Shop," was very interesting to me. It was about how, just 15 years ago Bob Langer and his colleague Joseph Vacanti pioneered a remarkable new process that involved the growing of human tissues in the lab. How interesting is that! This is the first time I have heard of anything like this being done. A shocking discovery I had made while reading the article was that earlier in 1987, Langer and Vacanti couldn't get their work published but now they are acknowledged as the fathers of the field of tissue engineering.

Just think about it without these two men we would have what is today "neo-organ." You may be asking yourself what that is. But it is tissue engineered skin, that was approved by the U.S Food and Drug Administration. This tissue engineered skin aids burn victims and patients with severe skin sores or ulcers.

Another positive attribute is that in the not-too-distant future, the lab-grown cartilage and bone could relieve arthritis sufferers, while blood vessels, cardiac valves and muscle tissue that could save thousands of cardiovascular disease patients. Wow! Developing these custom-made hearts, livers, breasts, corneas, kidneys, bone marrow and bladders could offer elegant solutions to most life-threatening illnesses. How great would that be?

Dr. Joseph Vacanti says, "We can't say what the time-line will be." "But there are thirty plus tissues we're experimenting on in our lab."  

 

This human heart valve was grown in the lab.

Imitating Life

Looking up above at that picture you may be wondering how that human heart valve was grown in a lab, so here some explanation provided by the article.

Cultivating tissues in the lab requires closely mimicking the environment in which cells naturally grow. This turns out to be a tall order. Unlocking the biochemical signals that influence growth and development was the first step on the road to tissue engineering. By adding the right combination of compounds, scientists coax cells into growing and proliferating.

But, to produce biologically useful tissues like cartilage and heart valves, tissue engineers must also pay special attention to the physical environment in which cells grow. In nature, the circulatory system gives each individual cell in a tissue access to nutrients and a means of waste removal.

Scaffolding 
One of Langer's major contributions was his work in biodegradable materials that can serve as scaffolding on which cells can be seeded. Joseph Vacanti deserves credit for the idea of the scaffold itself.

"The scaffold looks like strands of spaghetti attached together," according to Langer. "The cells are seeded 2 to 3 millimeters apart and the whole apparatus is bathed in a nutritive media." The biodegradable scaffolding provides each cell with better access to nutrients and waste removal. Additionally, since the scaffolding can be molded into any shape or size, the tissue can be custom grown for the intended recipient.

Look At This Example!!!!

After this human ear is removed,
the mouse will remain healthy.

To grow an ear like the one on the mouse pictured above, tissue engineers molded the biodegradable scaffold into the proper size and shape. Researchers then "seed" the scaffold with young cartilage cells and surgically implant the mold under the skin. The first question that came to my mind when I was reading was how and why didn't the mouse reject the human tissue then I found out that the hairless mouse was specially bred to lack an immune system that might reject the human tissue, and would nourish the ear as the cartilage cells grow.

To conclude it is said that in the future, bits of scaffolding seeded with young cells could be implanted into ailing organs, where the body's own biochemistry would direct the young cells to grow into a "patch" of healthy tissues.
"Both functions are important," according to Joseph Vacanti. "but, in many circumstances, the shape is less important than the exchange of nutrients. "