FLICKR, TAREQ SALAHUDDINCan organs like kidneys be made, to save lives? How efficiently can we custom-make highly differentiated cells, like podocytes (the kidney’s filtering cells), in Petri dishes and use them to develop better future therapies?
At a TED conference held in Long Beach, California, in 2011, Anthony Atala of Wake Forest University’s Institute for Regenerative Medicine demonstrated printing something that looked a lot like a human kidney by using live cells deposited in layers. Although Atala’s 3-D printed kidney may not have possessed the filtering capabilities necessary to function in the human body, it might be just a matter of time before this medical innovation becomes a reality, helping people in dire need of a transplant. Indeed,10 years ago, one of Atala's young patients, Luke Massella, received an engineered bladder made using similar technology.
Printing a human kidney, albeit non-functional, takes us a step closer to utilizing the enormous potential of stem cells from different sources. In a 2007 Nature ...
