Can you imagine a world where one day if you need a new heart you could just order one
made just for you?
Sound like science fiction?
Well we’re not so far off.
Hey guys, Julia here for DNews
Dudes, so something pretty cool just happened in the wonderful world of science.
Researchers grew BEATING HEARTS FROM HUMAN STEM CELLS.
Okay fine hyperbole, it’s not the whole heart just a few beating cells.
BUT IT’S SO COOL.
In a study published in the journal Nature, the researchers used human skin cells, turned
them into pluripotent cells and used physical and chemical signals to coax the cells into
forming little cardiac microchambers.
Which could be important for studying how the heart grows in an embryo or how drugs
might affect a fetus’s heart.
Or… looking way into the future, for growing hearts in a dish.
It could be a great way to replace organs.
No more waiting for a donor and since it would be perfect match to your body, no more terrible
drugs to prevent rejection.
So far smaller organs like tracheas and bladders have been grown in a lab using a person’s
own stem cells, but a heart is a little more complicated.
So let’s take a little look into how we got here.
First off, what are stem cells?
Stem cells are pluripotent, meaning they are undifferentiated cells that can develop into
any kind of cell.
Skin, heart, liver etc.
So alright, but what’s the big deal?
Why do researchers love to study stem cells?
Even from the earliest inklings of stem cells, there have been big dreams.
Researchers have hoped that one day they could be able to grow entire new organs from stem
cells that would be a perfect match for the recipient.
We’ve come a long way from the early days of stem cell research.
Human stem cells were first isolated in 1998 by two independent research teams led by James
A. Thomson of the University of Wisconsin and another by John D. Gearhart of Johns Hopkins
University School of Medicine.
These early stem cell lines were derived from early embryos, which are destroyed in the
process and thus stirred a little controversy.
Okay a lot of controversy.
Because of the debate that raged in the US surrounding embryonic stem cell research,
scientists looked to find stem cells in other adult tissues.
So a few years later in 2001 adult stem cells were found in fat tissue.
Now adult stem cells can be found from almost any tissue.
But they are tricky, they take a while to coax into growing in a dish.
So they’re not ideal.
But in 2007, in a paper published in the journal Nature Biotechnology, Dr. Anthony Alata discovered
that amniotic fluid also contains stem cells.
Which of course added more fuel to the debate.
And the same year, two independent teams of researchers pioneered a process to turn adult
somatic cells into pluripotent stem cells, naturally called induced pluripotent stem
cells.
The process involves introducing 4 different genes into the cells using a virus as a carrier.
The team from Japan led Shinya Yamanaka, published their work in the journal Cell and the team
from by James Thomson at University of Wisconsin–Madison published their work in the journal Nature.
And it was such a huge deal that, Yamanaka actually won the 2012 Nobel Prize for discovering
iPS cells.
Which of course this discovery held a lot of promise, it would sidestep some of the
controversy with embryonic stem cells.
But there are more than a few issues with their technique, like low efficiency, it’s
difficult to do and when done, only a few cells are reprogrammed.
Plus there’s weird problems with rejection and also a problem with tumors developing.
But problems aside, tons of studies have been and are being done with this technology.
With lofty goals, like attempting to cure blindness and diabetes.
The Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology says that IPS cells will also “allow
scientists to study complex human diseases in Petri dishes, a step toward analyzing the
conditions and developing therapies.”
Some researchers like Dr. Alata don’t care where the cells come from, just that they
work well.
No matter where stem cells come from, it’s clear that we’re on the road to organs grown
in a dish.
Well I certainly hope so.
But it’s also clear that more research is needed.
And really, lab grown organs can’t come soon enough!
If you wanna know the challenges of living with an organ transplant & why they fail,
check out this recent video
I did: