First Synthetic Organ Transplant
 

The first synthetic organ transplant has been performed using an "organ scaffold" made of glass, coated with stem cells. Partial text and link below:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-14047670

Surgeons in Sweden have carried out the world's first synthetic organ transplant.

Scientists in London created an artificial windpipe which was then coated in stem cells from the patient.

Crucially, the technique does not need a donor, and there is no risk of the organ being rejected. The surgeons stress a windpipe can also be made within days.

The key to the latest technique is modelling a structure or scaffold that is an exact replica of the patient's own windpipe, removing the need for a donor organ.

:cooking:

That is just insanely great.

Cheers
Aj

I have a friend whose son is the recipient of a heart transplant. She's hoping for great strides by the time he's out of elementary school. :)

Amazing! Thanks for sharing this story!!

Any time! I'm always down for a neat science link!

That's great to hear!....It makes me want to go back on the web and do further research....I was once studying about scaffolding for artificial livers many years ago....

That's really awesome!! If you do check it out and find out anything else, would you be so kind as to post it here?

I sure will....At the time, the need for donor livers exceeded what was available....Since the liver is the only organ that is capable of regeneration they were trying to use the hepatocytes to grow onto(?) or was that within(?) the scaffolding....The difficulty was the material used for the scaffolding (I believe )that was problematic at that time...

Well, I think I found a site that might be worth looking at insofar as scaffolding and creating a suitable human liver for transplantation....The site is: www.medpage.com

It appears like they are onto something....The vascular architecture of the liver is very complicated to replicate via biomedical engineering.....The seeding of the scaffold, how many millions of hepatocytes are needed for a successful regeneration, and successful transplantion---simply enormous....

I think there's something missing from the link. I see the main medpage homepage but am having trouble figuring out where to navigate to for that particular article.

That was something I was curious about too, regenerating organs requiring vascular structure. It's my understanding that the windpipe, being cartilagenous, is largely exempt from the necessity of regular, abundant blood flow. It seems it would be fairly impossible to regenerate an organ requiring erythrocyte pathways to match exactly.

I want to add more to this discussion, but I have some things to do...I will be back later....Sorry about the link.....