Tissue Engineer Sows Cells and Grows Organs

In the Wake Forest Intitute for regenerative medicine, Anthony Alata has been able to grow from scratch fully functional bladders. He uses a process called tissue engineering, where he takes a biodegradable scaffold filled with cells and inserts it into the body and it creates fully functional mature tissue. In addition, the goals of this process is to allow patients to no longer have to wait on the transplant list, be able to create new valves for hearts, and create cell preparations for crushed nerves. Dr. Alata began his career intent on becoming a physician, and after graduating medical school and completing residency, he was going to go to Harvard's one year fellowship program. Yet he was convinced to do the two year program with one year of fellowship and a year of research. This got Dr. Alata hooked to the tissue engineering field, and allowed him to expand and fix a few of the problems that he had seen in the surgeries he had preformed. One of these was when he was removing a bladder, the standard procedure was to cut out a section of bowel and implant it as a substitute bladder (a procedure since the 1800's). This procedure had many problems, one of them being that the intestinal tissue was designed to absorb, not excrete. So he began to see if he could grow a new bladder from healthy urothelial cells. After years of trial and error, he was able to grow a square tissue 1/2" x 1/2" into as much tissue as he needed in a petri dish. Then he was able to develop a bladder shape mold and seeded the inside with urothelial cells and the outside with muscle cells. After having great success of implanting the grown tissues in dogs, they were placed in seven children with spina bifida and the oldest of the new bladders has lasted over six years. With this great success, he began researching other tissues, like urethras, skeletal muscle, blood vessels and cartilage, which all grow in a similar fashion, just with changes in the cell type and the scaffold used. I thought this research was so interesting, because of how much it would improve medicine to have implants that would not be rejected, to one day remove the organ donor list, and be able to regrow limbs and parts that had been lost by people or soldiers.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/11/health/11prof.html?pagewanted=all