First LAB-GROWN KIDNEY successfully implanted into a rat. Phew. ‘Cause mine are shot.
The first lab-grown kidney has been successfully implanted into a rat. Sort of. With these sort of stories, there are caveats all over the fucking place. Still though, still! Hang. Don’t go running off. The actual story is pretty fucking outstanding.
The Verge:
Scientists have implanted a laboratory-grown kidney into a rat for the first time, a medical milestone that they hope will soon lead to similar solutions for human beings needing full organ transplants. “It’s the first one ever that’s been implanted into an animal,” said Harald Ott, MD and PhD at the Massachusetts General Hospital Center for Regenerative Medicine and the lead researcher behind the project, to The Verge.
Specifically, Ott and his team managed to grow whole new kidneys in several days outside of the animals’ bodies in “bioreactors,” chambers full of oxygen and nutrients, and then implant them into several rat test animals that were suffering from kidney failure. These bioengineered kidneys were able to link up to the rats’ circulatory system without rejection, produced urine just like real kidneys, and prolonged the rat subjects’ lives. “Based on this inital proof of principle, we hope that bioengineered kidneys will someday be able to fully replace kidney function just as donor kidneys do,” Ott said in a statement.
To be clear, Ott and his team still relied on donor organs for their work, but not in the way you might think. The researchers took several nonfunctioning kidneys from other, dead rats and stripped them of most of their tissue and cells using a soapy, liquid detergent solution. What was left behind was a scaffold made up of collagen — essentially the 3D-outline of a kidney — which the researchers then took and re-“seeded” with kidney cells from newborn rats and blood cells from humans. Previous research by other teams has also produced kidney scaffolds, but not gone the extra mile of re-seeding them and implanting them successfully into living animals. To re-attach the cells to the empty kidney scaffold in this case, the researchers used a pressurized solution. Finally, when all was said and done, they were able to watch the kidneys regrow into new, functional kidneys that secreted urine.