Body Building.

• Autores: Christine Soares
• Localización: Scientific American, ISSN 0036-8733, Vol. 290, Nº. 5, 2004, págs. 20-22
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • This article discusses stem cell research. Six years ago Michael Sefton of the University of Toronto challenged his colleagues in the fledgling field of tissue engineering to build a functioning human heart within 10 years. With the isolation of human embryonic stem cells later that year, Sefton's challenge seemed all the more relevant: stem cells, after all, are nature's starting point for building working organs. Last fall, for example, researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology reported generating tissues of neural, liver and cartilage cells, as well as formation of a "3D vessel-like network" on a biodegradable polymer scaffold seeded with human embryonic stem cells. Anthony Atala of Wake Forest University, who once grew a simple bladder in a beaker and transplanted it into a dog, teamed up more recently with Robert P. Lanza, also now with Wake Forest, and others to grow a mini kidney inside a cow. The idea of seeding an organ and letting the body do the rest of the construction might work for a kidney, because the patient could be treated with dialysis while the new organ was being generated, according to Jeffrey L. Platt, director of transplantation biology at the Mayo Clinic.