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Limbs bred Scientists bred an artificial rat paw
Enormous progress has been made in transplantation medicine in recent years. One area of this is so-called "tissue engineering", which one day will also help to breed organs that can be used for transplantation. Researchers in the US have now succeeded in breeding an artificial rat paw.
Enormous progress in transplantation medicine
Transplantation medicine has made great progress in recent years. For example, just a few weeks ago, the first transplantation of a skullcap was successful in the USA. In addition, more than two dozen facial transplants and more than 70 hand transplants have been performed. Also alarming are reports, according to which an Italian neurosurgeon wants to transplant the head of a terminally ill patient. A major problem in this area is the lack of donor organs. The so-called "tissue engineering" (tissue engineering), the artificial production of biological tissue, it should change something. With this help, organs will be bred in the future, among other things.
Researchers have successfully bred an artificial rat paw in the lab. (Image: Oleg Kozlov / fotolia.com) Method could be applied in human medicine in ten years
It has already succeeded in breeding blood vessels as well as skin and cartilage tissue. Now the news agency dpa reports that researchers in the US were able to produce an artificial rat paw. For people with severed limbs this has raised hopes. "I hope that in about ten years people will have a concrete benefit," said research director Harald Ott of the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) in Boston told the German Press Agency. In a nutrient medium, the team of the Austrian had grown the paw, which has a functioning vascular and muscle tissue. "We have freed the paw of a dead rat from all cells so that it no longer contained any cells," said Ott. "Then we quasi populated them with living cells." It is said that the result was an essentially functioning limb. "We have also freed the forearm of a baboon from cells and thus proved that the method can be used in principle in primates." The scientist calculates the information with an application in human medicine in about ten years. "Then you will not let a forearm grow, but maybe muscles."
Muscles of the artificial paw achieved great power
With a solvent, the researchers had solved in a day-long process, all living cells from the amputated paw of a rat. As they report in the journal "Biomaterials" only the basic structures have been preserved. They would then have occupied the individual parts again with living cells of another animal and in the following days, the individual tissues such as muscles and veins were grown again. In the muscles, cell growth was said to have been additionally stimulated by electrical stimulation. The resettlement process took a total of two weeks. The big advantage of this method is that the immune response after transplantation was significantly lower, since the transplanted organ was colonized with its own cells. The scientists explained that functional tests have shown that the artificial paw's muscles responded to electrical stimulation with contractions. Her strength has reached about 80 percent of the muscles of a newborn rat.
Replace limbs in humans?
By the same method, kidneys, livers, hearts and lungs of animals have already been created. However, limbs are much more complex. And even if previous results fueled the hope of someday being able to replace limbs in humans, the construction of the nerves remains a great challenge. "The complex nature of our limbs makes it a great challenge to replace them," said Ott. "They consist of muscles, bones, cartilage, tendons, ligaments and nerves - everything has to be built up and everything needs a certain basic structure." That this structure can be preserved and provided with new tissue, but his team has now proven.
Approach is not really new
Prof. Raymund Horch, Director of the Department of Plastic and Hand Surgery at the University Hospital Erlangen, said that the approach is not really new. Even with other tissues such as the heart or trachea (trachea), such a decellularization and repopularization had already been made, but have so far nevertheless found no entry into clinical application. "But it's an interesting approach, because in the end you need nature to have an optimal scaffold, which should then be brought back to life through decellularization," Horch said. "The real concern, namely once to breed entire organs, is not really solved." And even if this approach should work well in the future, still a donor organ is still needed. "But that was the problem with the initial idea of tissue engineering: they just wanted to circumvent the lack of donor organs." (Ad)