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Good News: Bioengineered Rat Kidney Passes Test
Tuesday 23rd April 2013 | sana
Approximately 18,000 kidney transplants take place in the United States each year, this number doesn’t seem so large when there are 100,000 Americans with end-stage kidney disease on the waiting list for a donor. Another issue is that even those lucky people who receive a transplant end up with a lifetime of immunosuppressive drugs and health risks.
Massachusetts General Hospital have been developing bioengineered rat kidneys and have confirmed that they have successfully produced urine in a laboratory apparatus after being transplanted into a living animal. The hospital published the report in Nature Medicine making public that they have created functional replacement kidneys on the structure of donor organs from which living cells have been stripped, which is the same method used to create bioartificial hearts, lungs and livers.
Harald Ott, HMS instructor of surgery at the Mass General Center for Regenerative Medicine stated “What is unique about this approach is that the native organ’s architecture is preserved, so that the resulting graft can be transplanted just like a donor kidney and connected to the recipient’s vascular and urinary systems,”
“If this technology can be scaled to human-sized grafts, patients suffering from renal failure who are currently waiting for donor kidneys or who are not transplant candidates could theoretically receive new organs derived from their own cells.”
The method for this study is based on a technology that Ott discovered while he was a research fellow at the University of Minnesota. Ott engineered donor organs by stripping the living cells from a donor organ with a detergent solution, after which he repopulated the collagen scaffold that remained with the appropriate cell type. In this instance, human endothelial cells to replace the lining of the vascular system and kidney cells from newborn rats. The first step the team took was to decellularize the rat kidneys to confirm that the organ’s complex structures would be preserved. They also showed that the technique worked successfully on a larger scale by stripping cells from pig and human kidneys.
The researchers conducted a test to check the kidneys by transplanting the bioengineered kidneys into living rats (from which one kidney was removed) and the result proved positive and the rats began producing urine as soon as the blood supply was restored, with no bleeding or clot formation.
The function of the regenerated organs was significantly reduced compared with that of normal, healthy kidneys, something the researchers believe may be attributed to the immaturity of the neonatal cells used to repopulate the scaffolding.
“Further refinement of the cell types used for seeding and additional maturation in culture may allow us to achieve a more functional organ,” says Ott. “Based on this initial proof of principle, we hope that bioengineered kidneys will someday be able to fully replace kidney function just as donor kidneys do. In an ideal world, such grafts could be produced ‘on demand’ from a patient’s own cells, helping us overcome both the organ shortage and the need for chronic immunosuppression. We’re now investigating methods of deriving the necessary cell types from patient-derived cells and refining the cell-seeding and organ culture methods to handle human-sized organs.”
The study was supported by National Institute of Health Director's New Innovator Award DP2 OD008749-01.
