Laboratory-Grown Kidney

Today kidneys are the most in-demand organs for transplantation because of its necessary role in filtering waste and excess water from the blood.  Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital have engineered an implantable kidney that when tested in animals started to produce urine.  The organ is "grown" by removing all cells from a donated organ and leaving it as a scaffold to be rebuild with the patient's own cells.  This procedure, if made to work for humans, would increase the number of kidneys available for implantation, eliminate the risk of rejection, and allow donated organs that previously would have been rejected to be used. 

 

The scaffolding used to regrow the kidney includes its original blood vessels and drainage pipes, and protein plumbing was used so that the right parts of the kidney would regrow in their correct locations.  When the kidney was tested in the laboratory it reached 23% production of a normal kidney but when implanted in the rat decreased to 5%.  Though the urine production is small, this discovery that solid organs can be "grown" will still have a big impact on future organ transplantation.

 

I chose this article because improvements in availability of organs for transplantation is a huge problem and in the future this development could be the solution.  The kidney is the most complex organ that has been regrown in this way and sets a major milestone on the way to being able to grow any kind of organ, no matter how complex.

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