Submitted via IRC for ErnestTBass
A simple injection that can help regrow damaged tissue has long been the dream of physicians and patients alike. A new study from researchers at UBC Okanagan moves that dream closer to reality with a device that makes encapsulating cells much faster, cheaper and more effective.
"The idea of injecting different kinds of tissue cells is not a new one," says Keekyoung Kim, assistant professor of engineering at UBC Okanagan and study co-author. "It's an enticing concept because by introducing cells into damaged tissue, we can supercharge the body's own processes to regrow and repair an injury."
Kim says everything from broken bones to torn ligaments could benefit from this kind of approach and suggests even whole organs could be repaired as the technology improves.
The problem, he says, is that cells on their own are delicate and tend not to survive when injected directly into the body.
"It turns out that to ensure cell survival, they need to be encased in a coating that protects them from physical damage and from the body's own immune system," says Mohamed Gamal, doctoral student in biomedical engineering and study lead author. "But it has been extremely difficult to do that kind of cell encapsulation, which has until now been done in a very costly, time consuming and wasteful process."
Kim and Gamal have solved that problem by developing an automated encapsulation device that encases many cells in a microgel using a specialized blue laser and purifies them to produce a clean useable sample in just a few minutes. The advantage of their system is that over 85 per cent of the cells survive and the process can be easily scaled up.
Source: Engineers make injectable tissues a reality
Mohamed G. A. Mohamed, Sina Kheiri, Saidul Islam, Hitendra Kumar, Annie Yang, Keekyoung Kim. An integrated microfluidic flow-focusing platform for on-chip fabrication and filtration of cell-laden microgels. Lab on a Chip, 2019; 19 (9): 1621 DOI: 10.1039/C9LC00073A
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Thursday May 02 2019, @03:48PM (1 child)
And talk about The journal it's published in. "Lab on a Chip" is such an absurd concept for a unifying field. Even if most of the submissions are from people who work on projects related to that, how the heck does the peer review process work. "Hey you, guy working on high frequency photoreception, review this paper on cloning immune cells in a pitri dish attached to a smart phone. ( [rsc.org]real [rsc.org] papers [rsc.org])
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday May 03 2019, @12:45AM
It's a good unifying idea, IMO, hopefully leading to small, cheap, and capable biology.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]