Growing organs from cells

Growing organs from cells

April 6, 2006

It's the stuff of science fiction- growing body parts from scratch using a person's own cells.Researchers have done it with simple tissue like skin and cartilage.

Now a Middletown teen is one of the first people to receive a grown complex human organ.

A rare birth defect damaged Kaitlyne McNamara's bladder.

It is another milestone in what is called regenerative medicine. Doctors have not only grown human organs in the lab, tonight they're reporting these custom-made bladders are working well four years after being implanted in patients.

Dr. Anthony Atala from Wake Forest University says, "One of the benefits we see of the study is to know these technologies are possible and can be done in patients with long term safety."

16-year-old Kaitlyne McNamara, born with a diseased bladder that left her incontinent. She was one of seven children to receive a new bladder.

Kaitlyne says,"Since I got the bladder I haven't had the accidents and I don't have to have people come up to me and say 'there's a problem'."

The lab procedure went like this: after extracting a tiny bit of Kaitlyne's diseased bladder, doctors isolated some healthy, adult stem cells and placed them on a mold, or "scaffold" one layer at a time, much like making a layered cake. Within seven weeks the cells grew together into a functioning organ, which was then implanted.

Dr. Alan Retik, Children's Hospital, Boston, says, "The improvements that you immediately see is that the bladder which was small before is much larger. The pressures in the bladder which were high, are much lower."

And because the bladder was created using a patient's own cells the body does not reject it.

Bladders are just the first of what could be many different organs grown in the lab and implanted in people.

Researchers at several universities, including Yale, are racing to develop "grow your own" hearts, blood vessels, livers and lungs.

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