Dr Ott, a CT surgery resident at Harvard, who has bio engineered other organs, along with his team bio engineered a kidney of rat in his lab and then transplanted it to test in the rat and it shows signs of "working"
The researchers used a shortcut to engineer the kidneys—starting with a scaffold of collagen, which is what remained after living cells were washed away from another rat’s kidney. They then seeded this matrix with a cocktail of cells, including kidney cells from newborn rats, which grew into a functioning organ.
His lab has been working on this for past few years. Check out their website.
A video to their experiment can be found here as well.
Few interesting points from the study.
1. ECM was left in place as a scaffold, and cells were bleeched and then seeding was via giving endothelial cells via artery and epithelial cells via ureter. Perhaps that scafolding is what makes that epithelial cell then become differentiated to a podocyte?- not clear
2. They showed that after perfusion, and transplantation, the kidney made urine.. but GFR was 30 fold lower than the control or cadveric transplantation. Unclear to me what time frame they used to get that CrCl.
3. What about mesangial cells? - how to they form in this structure
4. It was nice they showed polarity of some of the cells- that was cool
5. Proof of concept- nicely done and will lay foundation for many more studies to perfect this idea.
Bravo to the team led by a CT surgeon in making this a headway for us nephrologists and transplant surgeons.
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