Organs Made to Order | 40th Anniversary | Smithsonian
Current Issue
September 2014  magazine cover

Save 81% off the newsstand price!

Using scaffolds and a patients own cells grown in a laboratory, researchers are building replacement body parts. (Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center)

Organs Made to Order


Smithsonian Magazine | Subscribe


From This Story

Atala and co-workers make replacement parts out of patients’ own raw materials. To produce a bladder, they remove a small piece of a patient’s organ and separate out muscle cells and urothelial cells, which line the urinary tract. They put the cells into lab dishes and bathe each type in a fluid that prompts them to multiply. After six weeks, there are enough living cells for an entire bladder. The researchers then pour the muscle cells onto the outside of a scaffold made of collagen, the protein in connective tissue, and polyglycolic acid, a material used in absorbable sutures. Two days later, they coat the inside of the scaffold with urothelial cells. The new bladder is nurtured in an incubator that mimics body conditions, allowing the cells to grow and knit together. The bladder is then implanted into a patient, where the scaffold gradually dissolves. The researchers have standardized the bladder-growing procedure, Atala says with a smile, and now make “small, medium, large and extra-large sizes.”


Atala and his colleagues have also managed to fashion lab-built kidneys that produce urine when implanted into experimental animals. And within a few years, he says, human skin could be coaxed into growing in a lab and be given to burn victims and other patients who today must undergo painful skin grafts.

Organs grown outside the body will transform medicine, Atala predicts, but spurring repair and regrowth within the body will be just as important. He and other scientists foresee injecting healthy cells and growth-inducing molecules into diseased or injured lungs, livers and hearts, prompting them to regenerate. Then there’s the ultimate challenge: Could a patient someday regrow an entire limb?

“It is not outside the realm of possibility,” Atala says. “If a salamander can do it, why can’t a human?” Scientists are getting closer to understanding the subtle genetic and physiological processes that allow salamanders to regenerate their limbs from scratch. More clues are coming from lab mice that have a genetic mutation that allows them to partially regrow severed digits.

Will doctors 40 years from now be able to help humans regrow severed spinal cords, damaged hearts or even lost limbs? Atala says he is optimistic: “The things that are possible today were a dream 20 years ago.”

Gretchen Vogel lives in Berlin and writes for Science.


Comment on this Story

comments powered by Disqus