Growing Organs in a Lab? Not as Far Away as it Seems.

Season Fung

Growing complete organs in a lab seems light years away, right? Yet researchers at the UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health have already grown organoids – mini organs – in the lab. How exactly have they done this, you might ask? Well, one simple answer – stem cells.

The first of these breakthroughs happened In September 2020 when scientists from the Francis Crick Institute and GOSH grew ‘mini guts’. These ‘mini guts’ were built to help children with intestinal failure, as they cannot absorb peptides or digest sucrose, meaning they cannot properly digest food. Since organ transplants lead to rejection in most of these cases, scientists tried to find a solution.

Scientists tested the theory of building a smaller organ ‘organoid’, by itself. These scientists took biopsies from the intestine of 12 children (who had intestinal failure) and stimulated them to become intestinal organoids. Over the next 4 weeks, these ‘mini-guts’ were able to generate around 10 million intestinal stem cells per patient! Then, the scientists created tissue scaffolds, using samples of intestines taken from other children, who were undergoing surgery. After combining the stem cells with the tissue scaffolds, scientists found that the structures successfully grew to become living grafts! These structures could digest and absorb peptides and digest sucrose from food, acting just like a normal intestine would. What made this discovery even more ground-breaking was that when transplanted in mice, researchers found out that these grafts survived and matured! This is only the first step in creating whole organs for children, but this hasn’t been the only example of growing organs. In December 2020, scientists (for the first time) used similar methods to use stem cells to rebuild a whole, working, human thymus. This research was mainly done for children who don’t have a working thymus, which is where T-lymphocytes grow and mature. Lacking T-lymphocytes is a serious problem, as it can lead to severe immunodeficiency diseases.

Of course, stem cells are not only useful for their disease-curing properties, but also because they can serve as a useful tool in the understanding of human diseases. One such rare disease is the Usher syndrome, which is a rare condition which impairs both vision and hearing. As of right now, there is no cure for the vision loss caused by Usher syndrome, as there are no treatments for retinitis pigmentosa (the disease which causes this vision loss).

In the past, it was hard to study this disease since animal cells didn’t have the same type of vision loss as in humans. But this is where stem cells come in. Researchers have used stem cells from the skin of patients with Usher syndrome, in order to grow 3D ‘mini-eyes’, also called organoids. They did this by rearranging the rod cells into layers that imitate their structure in the retina. From this research, the team of scientists can now compare healthy eyes with eyes from a child with Usher Syndrome.

So far, scientists have found that Muller cells, which play a role in the structural support of the retina, are also involved in the Usher syndrome. They have also found that in patients with Usher syndrome, that they have an abnormal number of genes that are turned on for stress receptors and protein breakdown. Ultimately, scientists hope that this research will allow them to understand the best way to treat vison loss in children with Usher syndrome.

To conclude, organs grown in the lab are slowly but surely becoming a reality. And the driving force behind all this is stem cells. Stem cells that are made into organoids, and in the future possibly whole organs, are the future. Not only will they provide invaluable insight into the causes and effects of diseases, but in the future, they might also be able to create organs, without fear of rejection!

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