United States engineers try to build the human living organ from bottom to top

Keywords: human live organ

[] Hearing: human tissue engineers have been ongoing efforts to dialysis patients in the lab to produce an entirely by the patient's own cells to new patients with kidney, so there is no need to wait for the hard of organ donors, moreover, the patient's immune system may also have to rejection in organ donation. Similarly, diabetes patients are waiting for the transplant scientists in laboratories to produce pancreatic tissue, so that your body's ability to be recycled insulin. But advances in human tissue engineering has been slow, mainly because of the biological engineers are still not able to copy the complex structure of the human organism.

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However, it is gratifying to note that now Harvard and MIT researchers through bottom-up approach to create "live building" (livingLegos), has been in the move towards building a complex structure of the human body has taken an important step. The different shapes of the building block, biological compatibility Colloid and cell mosaic together, self-assembled human tissues of complex structures.

United States Harvard Medical School's bio-engineer Ali · Saddam Hussein said that living tissue with duplicate function cell, liver, for example, it is repeated hexagonal leaf. Each has a central branch vessel responsible for filtering the blood, the blood vessel and branch is surrounded by the filter virus cells, and these cells all around you will filter the blood vessels are transported to other organs in the export of vessels. Human tissue engineering of the traditional method is dependent on cell self-assembly and recycling structure. Biological Engineers in polymer scaffolds external "seeding" cells, like they can move to support internal and organized. Cells, though to a certain extent can self organization, but this top-down efforts of past achievements, but very limited.

The new method is trying to carefully control the cell tissue from bottom to build complex organizational structure. Researchers will cells mixed with a creature called polyethylene glycol compatibility polymer solution, and then add the mixture poured into a variety of massive, star-shaped, spherical or arbitrary Shapes stencil. When exposed to flashing when the polymer module will be solidified. These "living building blocks," so you can use to build a more complex structure, build up the complex structure of the exposed by Flash and together. But this kind of Assembly process very hard, because each module only about 100 microns wide.

Thus, the researchers came up with a simple two step process to achieve the "living building blocks" of self-assembly. 15 July of the United States National Academy of Sciences College newspaper, published in this way is based on water-immiscible oil's basic principle. When the water falls into the oil pool, will form a sphere, this shape minimizes the interaction between water and oil. Hydrophilic polymer building blocks is, therefore, when the researchers will module into mineral oil mixed pool, these modules will be clustered together to minimize contact with oil. These polymers module assembly into branches, squares and other shapes, with another Flash exposure can together. By changing the building blocks of size and shape and mixing speed, the resulting structure of the Organization will be able to be controlled.

By repeating this process, researchers will be able to build larger and larger structures, thus reconstituting the blood vessels throughout the organization. Through like keys and lock together with mixing different shape of building blocks, we can construct more complex structure. For example, Harvard University researchers produce spherical module can slide into the star-shaped module corner.

United States Hopkins of material scientists wool haiquan (transliteration) said this would be a cell can be placed to any hope of effective practices. positions Use this new method, entirely possible to build highly complex organizations, by contrast, the use of stents method you must use cells to "seed". United States University of Michigan's biomedical engineer Alpine Sau a also said that the initial results of the study are very encouraging. In the past, researchers have succeeded in self-assembled materials, but completed is like a computer chip that non-biological applications, this is truly a self-assembled biomaterials. But a Alpine show also cautioned that this work is still in its early stages, to be extended to a larger, more complex structure also face many challenges.

The researchers pointed out that, since the Assembly cell module can also be used to study the adjacent cells in the growth process is how to interact. Build a more complex structure, and is not a human tissue engineers face unique challenges. They also need a better understanding of the chemistry and environmental signals, such as what is a stem cell decision influence into liver cells or vascular cells, which will help them in the laboratory from stem cells generate organization. In addition, self-assembly cell module can also be used to study biological organism environment is how stem cells.

Currently, researchers are working to produce more complex self-assembled structures for the reconstituting the liver, pancreas and myocardial cells of repeat function.