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With thousands of people in need of heart transplants, researchers are trying to grow new organs. Doris Taylor doesn't take it as an insult when people call her Dr Frankenstein. “It was actually one of the bigger compliments I've gotten,” she says — an affirmation that her research is pushing the boundaries of the possible. Given the nature of her work as director of regenerative medicine research at the Texas Heart Institute in Houston, Taylor has to admit that the comparison is apt. She regularly harvests organs such as hearts and lungs from the newly dead, re-engineers them starting from...

Scientists in Canada have made a super-strong cell membrane adhesive and used it to stick red blood cells together. The polymer, based on the phospholipid head group phosphatidyl choline, could be used to secure cells in particular positions for tissue engineering and wound closure. Don Brooks, from the Centre for Blood Research at the University of British Columbia, who led the study, says inspiration for the work came after trying to understand the chemistry of cell membranes. ‘Phosphatidyl choline [PC] is found in every cell membrane, except for some primitive bacteria, so we wondered what would happen if we were...

Producing soft networks of droplets is now much less laborious and time consuming © Science/AAASBack in 2007, Hagan Bayley’s lab at the University of Oxford, UK, created bionetworks made from small droplets all linked together.1 Each of the aqueous droplets were individually pipetted into an oily phase, where they linked together to create a chain of droplets with a lipid bilayer at each interface. Into those bilayers Bayley’s postdoc at the time, Matt Holden, introduced the alpha-haemolysin (α-HL) protein that the group do a lot of their work on, and showed that the linked droplets could conduct a current. But...

People who suffer heart attacks are at increased risk of having a second and potentially fatal occurrence because of the damage the heart attack does to cardiac muscle tissue. Now scientists at the University of California San Diego have developed a new biomaterial - an injectable hydrogel  - that can repair the damage from heart attacks, and help promote the growth of new heart tissue.   Millions of people around the world suffer heart attacks every year and survive. These traumatic events occur when blood supply to the heart muscles is somehow blocked, robbing them of oxygen and causing them...

A new research breakthrough has enabled scientists to grow human tissue to repair or replace organs, and someday, maybe even limbs. Science correspondent Miles O'Brien reports.Be advised: Some of the images are graphic.MILES O'BRIEN: I am not sure when or why I thought it was a good idea to go for a bike ride on a 100-degree Texas afternoon with a 26-year-old Marine corporal. There I was eating Isaias Hernandez's dirt. No surprise, right? Well, take a look at his right thigh.CPL. ISAIAS HERNANDEZ, U.S. Marine Corps: It looked like a chicken, like if you would take a bite out...

Enlarge Image Lung "skeleton." The underlying air passages (left) and blood vessels (right) remain after lungs are decellularized. Credit: Petersen et al., Science For the first time, an animal has drawn a breath with lungs cultivated in the lab. Although preliminary, the results might eventually lead to replacement lungs for patients. People whose lungs are failing because of diseases such as emphysema or cystic fibrosis face a grim outlook. Only 10% to 20% of patients who undergo lung transplants survive for 10 years, versus about 50% for heart recipients. Research to create new lungs in the lab has lagged...

Norwegian scientists have developed a microfluidic platform to grow stem cells outside of the body in a controlled manner for a period of three weeks.  Stem cells from bone marrow are known as mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) and like all adult stem cells they survive in specific microenvironments within the body, known as niches. But it's not so easy to grow them outside the body as they spread out as they grow which makes it difficult to control their microenvironment in vitro, as they tend to inhabit and block feeding channels. Previous microfluidic systems using glass substrates use hazardous chemicals to...

Pirates can now trade in their peg-legs for real legs as scientists transform wood into bone.In a Royal Society of Chemistry journal Italian chemists show that ordinary wood can be turned into bone suitable for repairing damaged limbs.It brings a whole new meaning to the term "tree surgery".The microstructure of the wood is the perfect natural template for making bone as it allows growth of blood vessels and tissues, Anna Tampieri and colleagues report in the Journal of Materials Chemistry.By treating wood with a fairly simple set of chemical processes, the natural structure of the wood is retained.The wood is...

Enlarge ImageSpare parts. Blood vessels grown from a person's own cells may soon help kidney dialysis patients.Credit: Cytograft Tissue Engineering Scientists report today that artificial blood vessels made using a person's own skin cells work well in patients receiving kidney dialysis. The new blood vessels mark the first vascular grafts to be derived entirely from a patient's own tissues, which lowers the odds of a harmful immune reaction. Down the road, engineered grafts may also prove useful in treating patients with circulatory problems in their legs and coronary arteries. About 300,000 people a year in the United States receive...

Tissue engineering has made possible this doubly innovative operation - the first trachea transplant and the first tissue transplant to be performed without the need for immunosuppression. Professor Paolo Macchiarini, Head of the thoracic surgery department of Hospital Clínic has led the basic research and the international team formed by the universities of Bristol, Padua and Milan, who contributed to this success. The transplanted tissue is a hybrid from a donor that was repopulated with stem and epithelial cells from the recipient. Five months later, Claudia Castillo, who required the operation to save a lung following tuberculosis, is in perfect...

News Release 11.14.06A Abstract 1064/B17 CHICAGO, Nov. 14 -- For the first time, researchers have successfully used a rabbit's cells to grow heart-valve-shaped tissue inside the animal's body, according to research reported at the American Heart Association's Scientific Sessions 2006. The process may someday make it possible to grow rejection-proof replacement valves for humans using a person's own cells, a process called autologous tissue engineering. "It's the first fabrication of an autologous heart valve inside a living body," said Kyoko Hayashida, M.D., lead author of the study and a research fellow at the National Cardiovascular Center Research Institute in Osaka,...

April 3, 2006 — The news is being hailed as a medical milestone: Several years after receiving new bladders engineered entirely in a laboratory, seven young patients are all still healthy. It marks the first long-term success of total-organ tissue regeneration, an area of medicine that until now was more the stuff of science fiction than clinical reality. Dr. Anthony Atala, the director of the Institute for Regenerative Medicine at Wake Forest University in North Carolina, reports in tomorrow's issue of the medical journal The Lancet on the success of the new procedure, which was performed on children born with...

Bladders created in the laboratory from a patient's own cells and then implanted in seven young people have achieved good long-term results in all of them, a team of researchers reported yesterday in a medical journal. It takes about two months to grow the new bladder on a scaffold outside the body. After implantation, the engineered bladder enlarges over time in the recipient. The researchers say they expect that the new bladder will last a patient's lifetime, but the longevity will be known only as the children grow older. The hope is that someday the experimental reconstruction procedure will be...