Organs Made from Scratch

[TECH NEWS]

Growing living tissue and organs in the lab would be a life-saving trick. But replicating the complexity of an organ, by growing different types of cells in precisely the right arrangement—muscle held together with connective tissue and threaded with blood vessels, for example—is currently impossible. Researchers at MIT have taken a step toward this goal by coming up with a way to make “building blocks” containing different kinds of tissue that can be put together. Embryonic stem cells can turn into virtually any type of cell in the body. But controlling this process, known as differentiation, is tricky. If embryonic stem cells are left to grow in a tissue-culture dish, they will differentiate more or less at random, into a mixture of different types of cells. The MIT group, led by Ali Khademhosseini, put embryonic stem cells into “building blocks” containing gel that encouraged the cells to turn into certain types of cell. The gel degrades and disappears as the tissue grows. Eventually, the group hopes to make cardiac tissue by stacking blocks containing cells that have turned into muscle next to blocks containing blood vessels, and so forth.

11/17/10, Technology Review (MIT)