Submitted via IRC for Bytram
One step closer to growing made-to-order human kidneys
The results of the study, led by researchers from the National Institute for Physiological Sciences in Japan, will be published in an upcoming issue of Nature Communications.
For patients with end-stage renal disease, a kidney transplant is the only hope for regaining quality of life. Yet many of these patients will never undergo transplant surgery thanks to a chronic shortage of donor kidneys. With 95,000 patients on the waiting list for a donor kidney in the United States alone, demand far outstrips supply.
But researchers have been working on ways to grow healthy organs outside the human body. One such method, called blastocyst complementation, has already produced promising results. Researchers take blastocysts, the clusters of cells formed several days after egg fertilization, from mutant animals missing specific organs and inject them with stem cells from a normal donor, not necessarily of the same species. The stem cells then differentiate to form the entire missing organ in the resulting animal. The new organ retains the characteristics of the original stem cell donor, and can thus potentially be used in transplantation therapy.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 10 2019, @01:18AM
Human donors need to be carefully matched, and even then you normally must take anti-rejection drugs.
Pigs are worse... until genetically modified. Simply ripping out a bit of DNA makes them 100% perfect matches for anything other than liver and bone marrow.
(liver and bone marrow would bring the pig's immune system, and YOU haven't been modified, so it would attack you)