Whole Functional Organ Grown In Animal

It's always exciting to hear new 'world firsts' in the medical world, what caught my eye recently was that new strides were being made in the area of organ synthesis. An article from the BBC caught my attention. For the first time, a functional organ has been successfully grown inside an animal. Now you may have heard before of organs being synthesised in the laboratory environment, outside a living body. However that has changed. Scientists at the University of Edinburgh encouraged a group of cells ti develop into a thymus gland. The thymus gland is a notable part of the immune system where T-cells mature and grow. T-cells are part of a much larger operation when fighting disease and foreign microbes. The results for the study were published in the scientific journal Nature Cell Biology. The cells were implanted into mice, which then proliferated in number and took shape to a thymus gland.

But where did the cells come from? In fact, scientists were able to use mouse embryonic stem cells which were multi-potent. This useful property allows scientists to re-programme cells to develop into almost any type. The specificity of a cell which needs to be cultured is very important when developing a particular organ.

It is important to realise that this study is still in its early stages, and only with vigorous testing and further research will scientists be able to trial his technique on humans (or human tissue). Problems are likely to arise with regenerating organs, such as the fear of rejection from the patient. After all, embryonic stem cells were used - in patients adult stem cells would be more desirable to avoid rejection. Additionally scientists will need to be wary of the fact that the cells could divide uncontrollably to form a cancer.


Some have called this study to be analogous with one breakthrough last year when a brain the size of a human foetus's was synthesised. However to implement the brain into a living body proves very difficult, however the thymus can be seen as a simpler organ to replicate which is why it was used in this study. For example, the thymus is essentially a mass of tissue, it isn't divided into separate chambers like the brain. The only two main regions are the cortex and the medulla. (Wikipedia article - Thymus)


In my view, this step proves to be the start of a new age of regenerative medicine. Replicating one organ raises the obvious question: Can we make any organ? Theoretically, yes. However I imagine every organ has it's own problems when attempting to sculpt it's shape. Organs such as the heart and the stomach have intricate contours and a specific shape to their function. The rugae on the stomach lining contribute to a larger surface area for digestion for example.

An interesting point in the article was made about the potential of the findings. Where can a newly grown thymus be most useful in our society. In Britain, and perhaps in other parts of the world, there is an increasingly ageing population. Growing new thymus glands or simply thymus tissue, could be used to replace the ones of the elderly. It is known that with old age, the immune system tends to weaken partly due to the shrinking of the thymus.

As I have mentioned, the field of regenerative medicine has advanced at an alarming rate. Already, patients have been the recipients of newly grown tracheae, and blood vessels. This has been achieved so far by 'seeding' patient cells into a scaffolding which then slowly disintegrates over time to leave developed tissue.

But is this better than organ transplantation? Dr Paolo de Coppi of Ormond Street Hospital suggests "Research such as this demonstrates that organ engineering could, in the future, be a substitute for transplantation."


Credit to James Gallager, Health Editor for the BBC for his article which can be read in further detail here