Grow Your Own Replacement Parts

(CBS)  About 98,000 people are on a waiting list for transplants right now. Many of them will die before they get one. Now, a new generation of researchers is changing that, one cell at a time. This is the first in a two-part CBS News series on the innovative field of regenerative medicine. Scroll to the end for more information.

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In what you might call the laboratory of the future, Dr Anthony Atala is manufacturing body parts.

"Here you see an engineered blood vessel," he said. "You can actually see the vessel beating."

From blood vessels to muscle tissue, Atala and his team at Wake Forest University believe that in theory anything inside the body can be grown outside the body, CBS News correspondent Wyatt Andrews reports. And it's real: They've made 18 different types of tissue so far.

"That's a heart valve?" Andrews asked.

Atala said: "This is an engineered heart valve."

What he pointed to was a pulsing heart valve to be transplanted into a sheep.

"When people ask me 'what do you do,' we grow tissues and organs," he said. "We are making body parts that we can implant right back into patients."

Once considered a Frankenstein fantasy, the field of regenerative medicine is on the verge of unimagined breakthroughs. Scientists believe every part of the body has cells capable of regeneration - all researchers need to do is isolate those cells and coax them to grow.

And they use heart cells in an ink jet printer.

In the lab CBS News toured, the heart of a mouse was being made - a heart they grew layer by layer, by spraying the cells with a printer.

"So your heart cell is programmed to make more heart tissue, your bladder cells are programmed to make more bladder cells," Atala explained.

And it's Atala's work with human bladders that's truly on the frontier. In a clinical trial at Thomas Jefferson Hospital in Philadelphia, a patient got a bladder transplant - with a new bladder grown from her own cells.

Using Atala's regeneration techniques, her bladder cells were isolated, multiplied and seeded onto a biodegradable scaffold. Eight weeks later, her new bladder is in the operating room ready for transplant.

Dr. Patrick Shenot is her transplant surgeon.

"Its very much the future, but its today," Shenot said. "We are doing this today."

What's coming from this technology is a future of highly personal, mail-order medicine, where in order to cure your disease, your doctor will order you a replacement organ or body part and it will be custom made for you, using your own cells.

For the tens of thousands of patients who need organ transplants, this technology brings hope.

Hugh Snyder needs a bladder. And it could be a bladder from his own cells.

"Yeah. I would never have thought this ... possible," Snyder said.

Corporate America already sees what's possible. The Tengion Company has bought the license, built the factory, and is already making the bladders developed at Wake Forest.

"We're actually building a very real business around a very real and compelling patient need," said Dr. Steven Nichtberger, Tengion's CEO.

He says the company also plans to mass-produce blood vessels and kidneys.

"In regenerative medicine, I think it is similar to the semiconductor industry of the 1980s," Nichtberger said. "You don't know where its going to go, but you know its big."

This brand-new kind of medicine and this brand-new industry are set to change the landscape for transplanting organs.

Patients in the future, instead of waiting years for a donated organ, will wait a few weeks and … grow their own.

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For more on regenerative medicine and organ transplants, check out:

The McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine.

The non-profit United Network for Organ Sharing.

The non-profit Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network.

The non-profit organ and tissue donation group, Gift Of Life Organ Donation.

Wake Forest University.

Tengion Company.

[dan9111]

Although my equipment still functions as designed, I''''d like to grow a few new wieners just in case,.....
and a couple livers....

Posted by veteran71

Good idea. It might be nice for victims of circumcisions. The terroristic attacks on American babies soon can be reversed...

[yadayada821]

To the attention of Tengion Company; In 2000 my Mitral Valve blew out.I had used phen-fen.It was replaced with a prosthetic one. I also have a pace maker.I''ve had several sternum revisions since it will not heal. I suffered from chronic a-fib since open heart. In 9/2007 I had 16 ablations to the R atrium. Looks like my top two chambers are very scarred and have beaten themselves to death!I now rely on only one medication that I tolerate, Sotalol, and I''m told when it stops working the jig is up!Could I be a receipient of a heart grown from my own DNA? How soon will these be used? Is it FDA approved yet? I feel this is soon to become a very urgent issue for me. Doctors feel I''m probably full of scar tissue from the sternum revisions and the one open heart surgery. Is there help out there for me? I''m looking for hope.

Sincerely, Barbara

[bigredd551]

This is a big accomplishment. There are little kids and adults that have lost or never had an arm, leg, or something to that matter. I, myself, have a heart valve problem and is have to going to be replaced later on. Looking at this made me think ''Wow, me and a whole lot of others could use this to maybe make us not to have surgery when we get older. I would rather hope that it would help me to not have surgery. but the point of the matter is, we can grow back something we never had or lost, that makes me feel that there is someone out there, trying to help all of us these days.

[goldberg1980]

I know this will seem shallow, but if they can enlarge a *** with this technology, they will become a mega multi trillion dollar company. It would far surprise the excitement of Viagra. Not only would women have erect husbands, but they would also have well endowed erect husbands, which are a substantial difference, regardless to what women say in public. The divorce rate would plummet. I know it is sad, but the fact of the matter is a lot of male insecurity stems from this issue. I hate to make such a positive and substantial scientific breakthrough about vanity, but that is just where we are at as a society right now. If there is a man that would not honestly take advantage of this, or a wife that would not secretly wish it for their husband, more power to them, as for the rest of us, I hope someone can recognize the potential for the largest profits this world has ever know by reaching that *** enlargement capability before I%u2019m dead and gone.

[mrmazerati]

Awesome!

[b-easy63]

Most cancers occur at the cellular level. So to use a person''s own cells to propagate new tissue, may be to just replaced diseased organs with ...diseased organs.

[antoniof123]

Cool!!!

[rushman71]

Well, this may be a little light at the end of the tunnel for me. I have been half-blind on the right side of both of my eyes for the past 22 1/2 years due to a massive hemorrhage on the left side of my brain which cut the optical nerves. If these nerves can be repaired, then I am all for it.

[searingtruth]

Good night fellow patriots.
ST


"Our times are indeed dire, and foretold, and unfortunately there is little we can do to forestall the immediate crisis that confronts us.

However, we find ourselves at this moment in history for very simple reasons.

As I have said before, I am not religious. And yet I have found justice, compassion, and wisdom in the thoughts and writings of many historical religious, philosophical, and political figures.

And one of the saddest realities we face today is that so many of these wise men and women have already delivered most all the answers we seek.

Peace. Justice. Humility. Compassion. The willingness to stand for good when all others stand against it.

These are not new answers my friends, but amongst the oldest recorded. And when we abandon our most precious treasures of wisdom, we will suffer their warning.

But hope can never be lost. And there are times when suffering gives way to new understanding, and new opportunities to right the wrongs of the past, and boldly forge a more just and prosperous future for all.

I cannot help but hope that this is one of those times.

May goodness bless our great nation."
SearingTruth

[iceman_1960]

"I am jason, a handsome man from us. i am just at the beginning of my career and want to seek a rich women for support, maybe to be my Sugar Momma..."
- Posted by robert20076 at 08:49 AM : Feb 07, 2008

Good morning, Officer.

Be careful out there.