Is there no way to get new lungs?
It's worth trying the restored ones
Yekaterina_t, blog of Madrobots, Geektimes
Harald Ott, a surgeon at Harvard Medical School, believes that the unusual methods used in his laboratory will be able to solve the problem of the shortage of donor organs for transplantation in the future. On average, only in the USA about 20 people die every day due to the fact that donor organs are not received on time. If Ott's idea really works, then donors will not be needed in the future.
The basic idea is to take an organ and remove all living cells from it, leaving only a skeleton. Then the patient's stem cells are injected into the organ tissue, which are used to grow tissue cells of the specified organ. As a result, the resulting organ will not be rejected by the recipient's body, since the immune system considers it its own.
But after all, donors are still needed – after all, the original organ needs to be taken from somewhere? All right. But in this case, even an animal can be a donor. Ott showed that organs compatible with the human body (any) can be created, even if you take the source code from a pig or rat. It is clear that a rat lung cannot be transplanted to a person, as, indeed, a pig lung, but this is only an experiment that has shown the effectiveness of the method.
The approbation of the regeneration method with animal organs justified itself by 100%, showing the effectiveness of the method.
The scientist began to develop his methodology while studying at the University of Minnesota. A decade later, his own laboratory began to study the conditions in which stem cells could begin to develop in the tissue of a certain organ to restore the operability of this organ.
Now Ott's team has tried to transplant the recreated organs back into the organisms of donors – the same pigs and rats.
Despite the fact that the returned organs are already "human", that is, incompatible with the immune system of animals, the latter were able to live with them for a week. That is, the technique proved to be fully functional.
So far, the scientist does not reveal all the secrets, but we must think that the technology really has prospects.
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