Seven patients who needed new bladders received transplants of organs grown from their own cells. Dr. Anthony Atala, a pioneer in engineered organ research, and his colleagues at Wake Forest University in North Carolina conducted the operation on the patients who range in age from toddlers to teenagers and all suffer from spina bifida, a congenital birth defect. Normally, a hunk of intestine is modified to replace a faulty bladder, common in people who have the disease, but that procedure can lead to other problems. From CNN:
In the new procedure, doctors extract muscle and bladder cells from a small piece of the patient's own bladder. The cells are grown in a Petri dish, then layered onto a three-dimensional mold shaped like a bladder.
In a few weeks, the cells produce a new bladder, which is implanted into the patient. Within a few more weeks, the new bladder has grown to normal size and has started functioning.
Atala is working to grow 20 different tissues and organs, including blood vessels and hearts, in the laboratory, according to the university.
"We're not using any type of stem cell population or cloning techniques, but mainly the patient's own cells that we're using to create these organs and put them back into the patient," Atala told CNN.
Because the bladders are grown from a patient's own cells, there is no risk of rejection, as in a traditional transplant.
