Miracle of modern medicine: Refurbished Organs could save millions on the transplant list

NewsBharati    21-Feb-2018
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Cambridge, February 21: Organ transplantation is a miracle of modern medicine, but it has a pipeline problem: roughly 20 people die every day while waiting for an organ transplant. Scientists at Harvard Medical School think they may be able to solve that problem by sprucing up old organs from pigs and animals, giving the organs and their new owners alike a new lease on life.

Surgeon Harald Ott and his lab have developed a method that strips animal organs of their cells by washing them in a detergent, leaving behind a tissue scaffold that can be seeded with human stem cells from the patient in need. This would prevent a patient’s body from rejecting the organ, and mean that transplants would not need to spend their lives on anti-rejection drugs. As the cells grow on this scaffold, the lab uses a bioreactor that pumps the organ, keeping it healthy by stimulating it in the same way it would move in the body.

The team has successfully refurbished lungs, kidneys, hearts, and portions of intestines from rats and pigs to make them human-donor compatible, and then transplanted those organs back into animals. Though the human cells in these transplanted organs made them incompatible with the rats’ and pigs’ bodies, the organs worked — showing significant promise for future human trials. The lab also successfully re-grew muscle within human cadaver hearts that had been similarly stripped of their cells.