Using The Human Body to Create Artificial Organs Ajay Parikh

Artificial Bladder being developed at the Department of Urology at Harvard Medical School

Due to many different factors such as disease and injury, millions of Americans suffer tissue loss and/or organ failure yearly. These patients are put onto hopeful organ donor lists. Since the demand outnumbers the donors by an amazing amount, many patients suffer and live without key organs.

To fight this raging shortage, scientists during the past two decades have attempted to grow human organs in laboratories. While they have had limited success with skin and other simple tissues, they have encountered many challenges in producing complicated organs, such as the liver, Bladder, kidney and lung. Part of the difficulty is that those organs require a complicated network of vessels to support their growth. Such vascular systems bring oxygen and nutrients to the tissue and carry away waste. This provides energy and cellular support to the human body. Unlike in the human body, tissues grown in the laboratory do not necessarily generate their own vascular supply.

This is a massive success and accomplishment as many Americans have received this treatment. I think that this experiment was a tremendous success because now, most of the patients on the donor list receive brand new functional organs, unlike previously when only a fraction of the patients received functional organs. Many Americans are thrilled to hear the discovery as they were injured during their job or were just stricken by disease. This allows them to get back to their lives with out the constant worry of organ failure. Creating the body’s microenvironment to grow artificial organs is magnificent because it helps millions of Americans. This also affects the economy because more people are healed for job production and other industrial work.

“There’s only so much of a distance that the oxygen and nutrients and waste can travel, so you need to have not just a few large blood vessels, but this incredible network of blood vessels that goes down to the capillary level,” says Doctor Jeffrey Borenstein, director of the biomedical engineering center at Draper Laboratory in Boston.

Even though the advancement is young, as time passes and technology increases, full, functional human organs will be used regularly to prevent organ failure.
The goal is to grow full organ replacements for human patients. “I still think that’s 15 to 20 years away, but the day will come,” he says. “Really difficult organs like the liver and kidney may take that long, but there will be advances in the meantime,” he says.

References:

1. Creating the Body’s Microenvironment to Grow Artificial Organs, Grace V. Jean, March 2008, NATIONAL DEFENSE Magazine

2. Artificial Bladder, HEALTH AND MEDICINE, December 2006, Discover Magazine