Lab organs could hold key to donor shortage

Recent laboratory news could hold the key to solving the global donor shortage, as scientists say they have developed a way build fully functional organs using a patient's stem cells.

Organs could be built in laboratory conditions in the future, using three-dimensional biological scaffold mode with human or animal tissue and inserting the patients stem cells to regenerate and transplant organs. The new technique doesn’t require an organ donor and also eradicates the need for immunosuppressive drugs, according to the recent paper published in The Lancet.

The lead author, Paolo Macchiarini, from the Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden, said that the research team had already managed to repair and reconstruct several complex tissues, such as the trachea, oesophagus, and skeletal muscle. This could serve as “a platform for the engineering of whole organs and other tissues, and might become a viable and practical future therapeutic approach to meet demand after organ failure”.

The new technique has been outlined as a possible way of reducing waiting times for organ transplants. In the UK, patients are facing increasingly long waits for organ transplants, with the average wait for a new heart rising almost 70 per cent over three years and patients needing a new kidney having to hang on for 20 per cent longer, according to new NHS figures.

Posted by Ben Evans