Word: atala
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...takes Atala about six weeks to grow a new body part. The key to his success and speed, he says, is his reliance on a patient's own cells whenever possible. "We take a small piece of tissue from the diseased organ, grow up a bunch of normal cells, manipulate them and put them right back into the same patient," he says. "Because we are not using cells from other people, we avoid all issues with rejection." For the patient, that also means a shorter and more comfortable recovery, and a better chance of having the regenerated organ "take...
Creating a working organ hinges on keeping those first few cells alive, which has proven to be the biggest challenge for Atala's team. Each cell - whether from the bladder, skin, cartilage, or heart - prefers a different environment to grow, made up of unique cocktails of growth factors, enzymes, proteins and other nutrients. Once the incubated cells have multiplied to a sufficient number, Atala puts them through a series of rigorous tests to ensure that they look, act and function just like their normally grown siblings in the body...
...that's when the fun starts. In order to mold human organs from a clump of cells, Atala came up with creatively constructed scaffolds that would guide the newly grown cells into shape. In most cases - for the bladder, blood vessels and valves, for example - he uses a biodegradable material made of collagen, the structural component in skin. But in order to create more complex structures, such as the heart, he needed something far more sophisticated as a matrix. That's where the inkjet printer came in. One of Atala's colleagues had the bright idea that if a printer...
Earlier this year, Atala's group became the first to make another valuable discovery: that amniotic fluid contains stem cells. These have proven critical in helping his team to regenerate tissues from the more ornery cells of the pancreas, liver and nerves, which don't grow as well in a lab dish. Amniotic-fluid stem cells aren't as versatile as embryonic stem cells, which can turn into every tissue type in the body, but they can still develop into an impressive number of much-needed cell types, and Atala has already used them to grow up muscle, bone...
...first patients to receive Atala's regenerated organs were seven young children who were transplanted with bladders grown from their own cells. Eight years after their surgery, the children are doing well, and their bladders continue to function normally. Atala now has about 20 other tissues and organs in his lab almost ready for human trials, but he refuses to rush the technology. "Our goal is to transfer these technologies from bench to bedside in the fastest way possible," he says, "But we have gone slowly in these trials because we wanted to make sure that the tissues and organs...