If you were like me growing up, you spent countless hours building all types of structures out of wood blocks and plastic Legos. Researchers at MIT-Harvard Division of Health Sciences and Technology want to make building a human organ out of cultivated cells work the same way.
Ali Khademhosseini, assistant professor of HST, and former HST postdoctoral associate Javier Gomez Fernandez developed a process nicknamed "micromasonry," to build human tissues cell-by-cell. They published their work online in the journal Advanced Materials.
The ability to grow human tissue could shorten the wait time for patients in need of a life-saving transplant or skin graft.
Their experiment used living tissue cells (and would also work with stem cells). They placed the cells into a liquid polymer that, when exposed to light, solidified into a gel-like cube. Those cubes were then assembled into a tube shape.
The idea is that the cells inside would divide and multiply, performing other cellular functions that cause them to grow into tissue. In the meantime, as they grow, the gel-like matrix degrades and break down. What's left is a capillary-like tube made of cells.
"In our process, we help the cells in generating the final tissue microarchitecture," Khademhosseini told Discovery News Tech.
Overall growing tissue and organs is no easy task. In some procedures, tissue engineers put living cells into an organ-shaped scaffold or framework. The cells multiply and divide and populate the scaffold, growing into the shape of a capillary, bone or organ.
Other researchers have found a way to print cells using a technique that's almost identical to printing ink on paper. Only instead of ink, they use a solution containing cells. By printing in the same spot over and over, the solution builds up into a three-dimensional tissue shape.
But both processes have their challenges. Organ printing is an enormously complex process that requires a robotic machine not in widespread use. And tissue built from scaffold doesn't have the sophisticated cellular structure of living tissue. Some scientists have been able to build simple tissues like cartilage and skin before using these techniques. But there have been plenty of problems in trying to build more complex organs like lungs or the heart.
Khademhosseini and Gomez Fernandez say the process they are developing could offer a simple way to develop three-dimensional tissue that any lab can perform. Instead of organ creation (or organ repair!) being limited to just a few large labs, this process could be done in labs of every size.
Tags: Biotechnology, Chemistry, Tissue Engineering
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