Word: growing
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...hard to get rid of things around here. It's easy to grow things, [but] it's hard to cut them," Thompson says...
Moving from the thumb to other hand parts, Charles' brother Joseph Vacanti, a transplant surgeon and tissue-engineering pioneer in his own right, has grown human-shaped fingers on the back of a mouse, demonstrating that different cell types can grow together. He and colleagues at Boston's Massachusetts General Hospital shaped a polymer to resemble the end and middle finger bones. These shapes were seeded with bone, cartilage and tendon cells from a cow. Then the medical team assembled the pieces under the skin of the mouse--"just like you'd assemble the parts of a model airplane," says...
...muscle cells, just as weight training builds biceps. To make smaller vessels, Laval's Auger bends a sheet of muscle cells around a plastic tube and reinforces it with an outer layer of stiffer cells. Then he removes the tube and seeds the inside with lining cells, which soon grow together. The vessels have worked well in animal tests, and in the lab have withstood blood pressure 20 times normal...
...HEART--AND BEYOND. One drawback with all these techniques is that it takes time, usually several weeks, to grow organs using the patient's own cells. Although using these cells sidesteps the rejection problem, time is a luxury many patients, particularly heart patients, can't afford. So Michael Sefton, who directs the tissue-engineering center at the University of Toronto, has proposed building a "heart in a box"--complete with chambers, valves and heart muscles--from cells genetically engineered to block the signal with which the body marshals cells to attack invaders. Sefton envisions spin-offs along the way--like...
...efforts for the FDA. "Any problem that requires lots of cell types 'talking' to one another is really hard," she notes. Bone and cartilage efforts are much closer to fruition, and could be ready for human trials within two years. And what of those magical stem cells that can grow into any organ you happen to need--if the law, and biologists' knowledge, permit? "Using them," says Sefton, "is really the Holy Grail...