Word: bladders
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...fucking camel, man. But Anna is holding a ten-hour rehearsal today and isn’t allowing anyone to pee. I think that’s how Copernicus died.[Note: Actually, Copernicus’s death was unrelated to urine, while fellow astronomer Tycho Brahe died of a bladder infection after refusing to leave a banquet to relieve himself...
...Every cell in your body is programmed to do a job, and our job is to put these cells in the right environment in the lab so they know what to do," he says. "To us, it doesn't matter where the cell comes from - whether it's a bladder cell or a blood cell or an adult stem cell - we use whatever cell gets the job done...
...most cases, that cell comes right from whatever organ is ailing, and, in the ultimate feat of personalized medicine, from the ailing organ of the patient himself. Furthest along in development are regenerated human bladders, which are already being tested in early human trials and which Atala has thoughtfully designed in small, medium and large sizes. Not far behind on the organ assembly line are heart valves and blood vessels. Atala began with the bladder not only because of his training as a pediatric urologist, but also because bladder cells are among the many that can be grown outside...
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...