Seeking innovative solutions for the pressing shortage of human transplant organs, scientists have grown mouse pancreases in rats and used them to cure diabetes in mice, they said Wednesday.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Although an early step, the feat could bring closer the day when life-saving human organs may be grown in pigs or sheep, the researchers and observers said.<\/p>\n
Mice who received transplanted pancreatic tissue in the trial needed only five days of treatment with immunosuppressive drugs to stop their bodies rejecting the foreign matter, the study authors said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe found that the diabetic mice were able to normalise their blood glucose levels for over a year after transplantation,\u201d said study co-author Hiromitsu Nakauchi of Stanford University.<\/p>\n
Growing human organs in large animals is considered a potential solution for the shortage of transplant hearts, kidneys, livers, lungs and other organs.<\/p>\n
In the United States alone, more than 76,000 people are waiting for a transplant, said the authors of the study, published in Nature.<\/p>\n
Petri-dish attempts to grow transplantable organs \u2014 which comprise billions of often highly-specialised cells \u2014 have been frustrating.<\/p>\n
\u201cAlthough scientists have begun to master the art of making assemblies of cells that resemble organ precursors in a petri dish, the microscopic size and rudimentary organisation of these organoids is a far cry from that of an adult organ,\u201d Harvard University biologist Qiao Zhou, who did not take part in the study, said in a comment published by Nature.<\/p>\n
The next logical step is to determine whether organs can be grown in different species.<\/p>\n
The same team, in 2010, managed to grow a rat pancreas in a mouse.<\/p>\n
But the organ grew only to the size of a mouse pancreas, which meant there was not enough tissue for transplant to a rat.<\/p>\n
This time, the scientists switched the animals\u2019 roles.<\/p>\n
They created mouse-rat \u201cchimeras\u201d or hybrids by injecting pluripotent stem cells \u2014 which can become any specialised cell of the body \u2014 into rat embryos.<\/p>\n
Almost every organ and tissue of the resulting adults was a mixture of rat and mouse cells, apart from the pancreas which was mainly mouse.<\/p>\n
To create this exception, the team had engineered the embryos to lack a gene key in pancreas development.<\/p>\n
This meant that the hybrid creatures had to rely on the injected mouse cells to develop the organ.<\/p>\n
Once the animals were fully grown, the scientists extracted clusters of insulin-producing Beta cells from their pancreases.<\/p>\n
They transplanted these into diabetic mice that genetically matched the stem cells which had been used to create the organs in the first place.<\/p>\n
The mice did not need life-long immunosuppression treatment as do many human transplant recipients, the researchers said.<\/p>\n
The new cells boosted function of the diabetic mouse pancreases, secreting insulin and returning blood sugar levels to within the normal range, the team said.<\/p>\n
Encouragingly, a small number of rat cells in the transplant material spontaneously disappeared from the recipient mice over time, the study showed.<\/p>\n
It remains to be seen whether the technique could be used in species that are more distantly related than rats and mice, said Zhou.<\/p>\n
\u201cBefore human organs can be grown in animals, many technical challenges will need to be overcome, and ethical and legal questions addressed,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut given the pressing clinical need for organs for transplantation, and the lack of good options available, this line of research must continue.\u201d<\/p>\n
Robin Lovell-Badge of the Francis Crick Institute, a medical research centre in London, said the work was potentially important but \u201ca very long way from practical applications for humans.\u201d\u2014AFP<\/p>\n
Image: Alamy<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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