While making rat kidneys from scratch in a lab sounds like something the teenaged Dr. Frankenstein might have engaged in, today, it’s a significant step toward helping patients with debilitating kidney diseases.
With one in 10 American adults – more than 20 million people – having have some level of chronic kidney disease, according to the CDC, the stakes are higher than ever before to find some workable way to replace diseased kidneys. While about 100,000 of these people await kidney transplants from living (or recently deceased) donors, scientists are forging ahead with alternatives.
Many worldwide laboratory organizations, both public and private, are currently competing to develop new methods with which to develop functional organs, through such futuristic techniques as 3D printing (which has already yielded a lab-made kidney that works in lab rodents), or through a "bioreactor" process that slowly infuses cells onto the rudimentary scaffold of a kidney, according to a Reuters article on Sunday.
The latter process is the foundation of a new study conducted by the Center for Regenerative Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, which has yielded functional kidneys for lab rats, which has researchers fairly excited.
If what succeeded in rats "can be scaled to human-sized grafts," then patients waiting for donor kidneys "could theoretically receive new organs derived from their own cells," said Dr. Harald Ott, who led the research reported in the online edition of Nature Medicine.
Ott and his team started with kidneys from 68 rats, and used detergent to remove the actual cells. That left behind a "renal scaffold," a three-dimensional framework made of the fibrous protein collagen, complete with all of a kidney's functional plumbing, from filter to ureter, reported Reuters. The framework was then “seeded” with healthy renal cells from baby rats and blood-vessel-lining cells from human donors.
Three to five days later, the scientists had their "bioengineered" kidneys. Transplanted back into living rats missing a kidney, the bioengineered kidneys would not quite as efficient at filtering blood wastes as ordinary kidneys, but they still did pretty well, according to Ott and his team.
If the process could be duplicated in humans (the researchers hope to try it next on a larger scale, with pigs), it would provide functional organs with low possibilities for rejection, a common complication of transplanted kidneys, and eliminating the need for a lifetime of immune suppression drugs to prevent rejection.
Edited by
Braden Becker
