Laboratory-grown replacement organs have moved a step closer, as MRC Centre for Regenerative Medicine at the University of Edinburgh (United Kingdom) researchers report that they have grown a fully functional organ from transplanted laboratory-created cells in a living animal for the first time. Clare Blackburn and colleagues have created a thymus – the organ that supplies the body with immune cells. Specialized thymus cells were created in the lab from a completely different cell type using a technique called reprogramming. The laboratory-created cells were transplanted onto a mouse kidney to form an organized and functional mini-thymus in a living animal. The study authors submit that they: “demonstrate that cellular reprogramming approaches can be used to generate an entire organ, and open the possibility of widespread use of thymus transplantation to boost immune function in patients.”
A Major Regenerative Medicine Milestone
Scientists have grown a fully functional organ from transplanted laboratory-created cells in a living animal for the first time.
Bredenkamp N, Ulyanchenko S, O'Neill KE, Manley NR, Vaidya HJ, Blackburn CC. “An organized and functional thymus generated from FOXN1-reprogrammed fibroblasts.” Nat Cell Biol. 2014 Aug 24.
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