Tissue Engineering: Growing Body Parts in a Lab
What is it?
Tissue engineering is a field of medicine where scientists grow living body tissue in a lab to replace or repair parts of the body that are damaged. To do this, they place human cells onto a tiny 3D frame called a scaffold, which guides the cells to grow into the correct shape. Doctors have already used this to grow skin, cartilage, bone, and even blood vessels for patients with serious injuries or diseases.
3 Things to Know
Lab-grown tissue gives scientists a way to test new medicines on real human cells, which means fewer tests on animals.
Although only skin, cartilage, and some blood vessels are being used in patients today, scientists are working toward complex organs like hearts and kidneys.
When a patient receives an organ from a donor, there immune system might attack it as a stranger. If the organ is built from the patient's own cells, that problem goes away.
Fun Fact
Instead of creating a scaffold from scratch, scientists sometimes take an organ, wash all the original cells out of it, and are left with a perfect “shell” that human cells can grow inside!
Current research
If a lab-grown organ can be made from a patient's own cells, could scientists also give those cells new abilities, like finding and fighting cancer from inside the body?
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