Growing New Organs 2006 – Artificial Organ Engineering

CBS News correspondent Wyatt Andrews writes: 

“Imagine... creating an organ that could be grown in a laboratory and transplanted into a patient without the risk of rejection. It sounds like science fiction, but... this is the boom in regenerative medicine, where scientists are learning to harness the body's power to regenerate itself, with astonishing results.”

In 2006, at Wake Forest University School of Medicine in North Carolina, a research team led by Dr. Anthony Atala created a urinary bladder as the world's first laboratory-grown organ and successfully transplanted it into a child. 

A normal urinary bladder has the following structure:

• Muscles on the outside 
• Collagen (connective tissue) in the middle
• An inner lining of urothelial cells that is impermeable to urine

Regenerative medicine creates living, functional tissues and organs for use in the human body. Dr. Atala designed bladders for young people whose bladders were defective because of spina bifida, which involves spinal cord defects. 

The children's small, stiff bladders often forced urine back toward the kidneys, causing kidney damage. Traditionally, replacement bladders were made from pieces of the child's intestine. However, because intestinal tissue is designed to absorb chemicals, these recipients face a higher risk of cancer and abnormally high calcium levels.

To make transplantation of the engineered bladder possible, Dr. Atala:

• Took some muscle and urothelial cells from a child's bladder
• Allowed the cells to grow outside the body in Petri dishes for several weeks
• Then “painted” the muscle cells onto the outside of a bladder-shaped scaffold made of collagen
• Coated the inside of the scaffold with urothelial cells
• Placed this immature bladder in a nutrient fluid and incubated it for ten days
• Successfully connected the resulting bladder to the child's original ureters at the top and sphincters (circular muscles) at the bottom

Scientists are now investigating the creation of other artificial organs and tubes using similar methods. In 2011, a patient received a synthetic trachea (windpipe) created in a laboratory using the patient's own stem cells.

Historical Figure Mentioned in the Article: Anthony Atala (b. 1958)

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