Whether you're against animal testing or not, at a certain point other mammals can't stand in for humans. Biologists in Germany hope the artificial organs they're developing can do the job instead.
Human liver cells don't last much longer than a day for testing and other animal livers are too different from our own to provide valid results. With that in mind, biotech professor Heike Mertsching and biology postdoc Johanna Schanz recently developed an artificial liver at the Fraunhofer Institute for Interfacial Engineering and Biotechnology in Stuttgart.
The liver was created using pig intestines from a slaughterhouse for the blood vessel system, which was cleaned and then filled with two different types of human cells. An automated bioreactor and pump kept the blood substitution circulating. So far the system works for around three weeks. The human cells come from clinics that perform biopsies, liposuction, and other voluntary tissue-removal. If all goes as planned, this liver could greatly shorten the time required to make and test drugs. The researchers are also working on developing artificial skin, intestines, and tracheas.
Schanz says that while the pig intestines work now for the liver model, if their approach is scaled up then novel techniques, including one called "electrospinning," could one day replace the pig parts. "It’s new and under development to produce three-dimensional scaffolds out of protein and build up such complex systems like vascularity," she says. "This is the future."
Photo: Johanna Schanz (left) holds an artificial liver that she and Heike Mertsching (right) developed at the Fraunhofer Institute. Credit: Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft.
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Tags: Biotechnology, Green Tech, Modern Medicine, Synthetic Biology, Tissue Engineering
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