Fat Helps Heal

3D cell structures can be achieved thanks to the trash of Deepak Negrath of Rice university. By trash I'm referring to a "contaminated" set of plates Negrath was attempting to grow cells in a scaffold. As soon as the cells secreted a sticky substance he saw it as contamination and discarded the plates. It turns out that sticky substance was extracellular matrix and just what he was trying to grow in the first place. This extracellular matrix was grown from adipose cells that, now, can grow and mature on a scaffold due to this research. This material can potentially be injected into the human body and help repair varying types of tissues with no rejection of material. Basically the fat cells are prompted to secrete basement membrane that mimics the architecture tissues natrually used in cell growth. This is literally a framework that cells attach to when they form a network. Once these cells have matrued into the desired tissue, they secrete another type of substance that breaks down and destroys the scaffold. This substance is called Adipogel and has proven to effectively grow hepatocyctes which are the primary liver cells used in pharmaceutical testing.

This can be very valuable to pharmaceutical companies for testing drugs in vitro. There's been something similar made called Matrigel but it's secreted by mouse cancer cells, thus why it can't be injected into humans.

If this research holds true, there would almost no strain on retrieving fat cells to use. Because fat is in excess in the body we can always get rid of it. There is another method being researched in nature nanotechnology taht uses magnetic levitation to grown 3D cell structures. While this is beneficial, fat cells are still more easily accessible. The goal is to use these fat cells as a feeder layer for human embryonic stem cells.

I found this interesting because while (especially these days) we see fat as an overall bad thing and something to get rid of, it can also be used to help and even heal our body. Also the fact that if this all proves true, the answer for stem cell scaffolding doesn't lie in something fancy and cool..it's just fat and that's pretty ironic to me.