Organ Transplant Breakthrough – Grow Your Own Organ
Written by Prince Paul on Sunday, June 27th, 2010
Ever wanted to grow an extra organ just for backup? Well, now you can! Scientists have grown a liver in a laboratory, offering fresh hope to hundreds of thousands of patients with diseased and damaged organs. This medical breakthrough is an important step to providing those in need of organ transplants an option to avail of organs that are “made-to-order”.
However, this technology is not yet available to the public or even commercially. This has only been done in the lab and could be available only after five years.
So how does this work? How do you grow your own organ, say for example a liver?
1. Bathe donated damaged liver in detergent to remove cells.
2. After step 1, what remains is a ‘scaffold’ of collagen and blood vessels.
3. The scaffold is bombarded with healthy liver cells from the patient made from stem cells of the skin.
4. The new liver replaces the old one without hassle as the body does not reject it because it is made with their own cells.
Well, that is as simple as it gets. Once and if this medical technology goes mainstream, it has the potential of saving millions of lives in need of organ replacement.