Another "organ in a test tube"
The stomach was grown in a Petri dish
According to the lead author of the study, James Wells, in the future this technology will help to create new tissues and organs for the treatment of people with various stomach diseases, including congenital genetic disorders and cancer. However, this is still far away. But currently, such a stomach can become an excellent model for studying many diseases, and can also be used to develop new drugs.
"Until now, it has not been possible to obtain stomach cells from human pluripotent stem cells. This is the first time we have managed to do this. We also managed to understand how to make these cells form a three–dimensional tissue that performs all the functions of a real stomach," Wells says (in a press release Cincinnati Children's Hospital Scientists Generate the First Human Stomach Tissue in Lab with Stem Cells – VM).
Folds of the mucosa of the grown stomach
Scientists say that in order to understand how to turn human pluripotent stem cells (cells that give rise to many specialized cells and tissues) into stomach cells, they figured out how the stomach is formed in an embryo. As it turned out, pluripotent stem cells needed to be treated with several components. For this transformation, scientists used fibroblast growth factors, the Wnt signaling pathway (it regulates embryo development), a group of BMP proteins, epidermal growth factor and retinoic acid.
About a month after such manipulations, a gastric organoid was formed from pluripotent stem cells in a Petri dish. That's what scientists called this tiny organ, which has a diameter of about 3 mm.
Then, they decided to find out how this organ would react to the bacterium Helicobacter pylori, which modern medicine considers the main cause of stomach ulcers.
According to scientists, they were surprised by how quickly this bacterium affected the epithelium of the stomach: after 24 hours, biochemical changes began to occur there.
According to Wells, their miniature stomach can also become a model for studying metabolic syndrome and obesity. To date, there are many unresolved issues in this issue, which were difficult to understand precisely because there was no adequate model for studying these states.
The results of scientists' research on growing a miniature stomach are published in the latest issue of the journal Nature (McCracken et al., Modeling human development and disease in pluripotent stem-cell-derived gastric organoids).
More recently, Wells and his colleagues managed to make another discovery in the field of regenerative medicine.
Scientists have grown a piece of intestinal tissue from human skin cells. Initially, they received induced pluripotent stem cells, and then they were already turned into intestinal cells and tissues. They also managed to implant this tissue into the kidney of mice for the first time, where a fully functioning intestine was formed. The scientists reported their achievement last week in the journal Nature Medicine.
In general, cellular technologies have advanced very far – bioengineers are already able to grow fully functioning organs.
Recently, Scottish scientists for the first time grew a working organ from mouse fibroblast cells - the thymus or thymus gland (the most important organ of the immune system). When this thymus was planted to the animals in the kidney, it turned out that it works perfectly and performs all the necessary functions.
Scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology managed to grow a working human liver in a mouse.
Earlier this year, scientists from the University of Texas reported that they managed to grow human lungs. However, it is not yet clear whether they will be able to work normally.
Scientists have also grown a retina capable of "seeing" from pluripotent human stem cells.
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru30.10.2014