Fairly often and usually after some amount of drinking (irony noted), I get into discussions with friends about how none of us are ever going to have to die. At least not for a very long time. Because medicine is amazing and new research is announced every day suggesting new paths toward curing this or that thing in increasingly clever and less painful/debilitating ways. Sober, I’m a lot less of an optimist, at the very least because it’s then that I remember that all of this awesome work toward new medical technology is not neccessarily work toward affordable medical technology, not that science has an obligation to compensate for skewed societal priorities. Anyhow, on those alcohol-enhanced optimistic kicks, I’m thinking of things like this: a rudimentary liver grown in a dish from stem cells.Dying from liver disease is an exceptionally awful thing. Whether it comes from cancer or alcoholism, liver failure means your body can’t get rid of toxic substances. It also means your body can’t produce a number of crucial things it needs, like bile and albumin. Sans functioning liver, your abdomen fills up with fluid, toxins turn your brain to mush, infection spreads through your entire body, and other assorted painful, miserable consequences. It also takes a while. People die this way in some cases because there wasn’t an available transplant, at least a transplant in time. So, an alternative to transplantation is crucial — like, say, growing your own organ in a dish.
The liver-in-a-dish research isn’t published yet, but was presented last week by biologist Takanori Takebe at the annual meeting of the International Society for Stem Cell Research in Yokohama, Japan. It’s still very basic, consisting of skin stem cells reprogrammed to an embryonic state (a task which is itself not basic at all, of course). After nine days, they had developed into maturing liver cells. Nature reports:At that key point, Takebe added two more types of cell known to help to recreate organ-like function in animals: endothelial cells, which line blood vessels, taken from an umbilical cord; and mesenchymal cells, which can differentiate into bone, cartilage or fat, taken from bone marrow. Two days later, the cells assembled into a 5-millimetre-long, three-dimensional tissue that the researchers labelled a liver bud — an early stage of liver development.The researchers transplanted some of the cells to a mouse, where they actually worked, doing things that mouse livers normally can’t but that human livers can. The tissue isn’t very stable though, so it can’t last all that long, nor can it hold its shape. Unlike your actual real liver, the researcher’s lab tissue is just kind of a blob, which might not work so well inside a human body. So all of this being reality is a very long time away and, even then, will more likely be a time-buying tool for patients waiting for transplants, rather than the transplant itself. Still pretty neat and exciting in a science is awesome kind of way.
By the by, y’all organ donors? Yeah? Make sure you tell Facebook.Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.
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