A team of researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston has engineered functional rat kidneys by stripping donor kidneys of their cells and then repopulating the remaining collagen substructures with new cells. The bioengineered kidneys produced urine in laboratory dishes and when implanted in living animals.
The advance could be good news for the 100,000 Americans waiting for donor kidneys for transplant, because it suggests that someday scientists might be able to grow custom-made kidneys for people, using a patient's own cells to seed tissues, said Dr. Harald Ott, a researcher at the Massachusetts General Hospital Center for Regenerative Medicine and senior author of a paper describing the discovery published online Sunday in the journal Nature Medicine.
“My goal was to show it’s possible,†said Ott, who previously created bioengineered rat lungs and rat hearts using the same technique.
The advance could be good news for the 100,000 Americans waiting for donor kidneys for transplant, because it suggests that someday scientists might be able to grow custom-made kidneys for people, using a patient's own cells to seed tissues, said Dr. Harald Ott, a researcher at the Massachusetts General Hospital Center for Regenerative Medicine and senior author of a paper describing the discovery published online Sunday in the journal Nature Medicine.
“My goal was to show it’s possible,†said Ott, who previously created bioengineered rat lungs and rat hearts using the same technique.