At the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, rat hearts and lungs are washed of living cells to reveal the extracellular structure.
Two and a half yearsago doctors in Iceland, where Mr. Beyene was studyingto be an engineer, discovered a golf-ball-size tumor growing into his windpipe. Despite surgery and radiation, it kept growing. In the spring of 2011, whenMr. Beyene came to Sweden to see another doctor, he was practically out of options. “I was almost dead,” he said. “There was suffering. A lot of suffering.”
But the doctor, PaoloMacchiarini, at the Karolinska Institute here, had a radical idea. He wanted to make Mr. Beyene a new windpipe, out of plastic and his own cells.
Implanting such a “bioartificial” organ would be a first-of-its-kind procedurefor the field of regenerative medicine, which for decades has been promising a future of ready-made replacement organs — livers, kidneys, even hearts — built in the laboratory.
For the most part that future has remained a science-fiction fantasy. Now, however, researchers like Dr. Macchiarini are building organs witha different approach,using the body’s cellsand letting the body itself do most of the work.
“The human body is so beautiful, I’m convinced we must use it in the most proper way,” said Dr.Macchiarini, a surgeon who runs a laboratory that is a leader in the field , also called tissue engineering.
So far, only a few organs have been made and transplanted, and they are relatively simple, hollow ones — like bladders and Mr. Beyene’s windpipe, which was implanted in June 2011. But scientists around theworld are using similar techniques with the goal of building more complex organs. At Wake Forest University in North Carolina, for example, where the bladders were developed , researchers are working on kidneys, livers and more. Labsin China and the Netherlands are among many working on blood vessels.
The work of these new body builders isfar different from the efforts that produced artificial hearts decades ago. Those devices, whichare still used temporarily by somepatients awaiting transplants, are sophisticated machines, but in the end they are only that: machines.
Tissue engineers aimto produce something that is more human. They want to make organs with the cells, blood vessels and nerves to become a living, functioning part of the body. Some, like Dr. Macchiarini, wantto go even further —to harness the body’s repair mechanisms so that it can remake a damaged organ on its own.
Researchers are making use of advances in knowledge of stem cells , basic cells that can be transformed into types that are specific to tissues like liver or lung. They are learning more about what they call scaffolds, compounds that act like mortar to hold cells in their proper place and that also play a major role in how cells are recruited for tissue repair.
Tissue engineers caution that the work they are doing is experimental and costly, and that the creation of complex organs is still a long way off. But they areincreasingly optimistic about the possibilities.
“Over 27 years, I’ve become more convinced that this isdoable,” said Dr. Joseph P. Vacanti , a director of the Laboratory for TissueEngineering and Organ Fabrication at Massachusetts General Hospital anda pioneer in the field.
In Mr. Beyene’s case, an exact copy of his windpipe was made from a porous, fibrous plastic, whichwas then seeded with stem cells harvested from his bone marrow. After just a day and a half in a bioreactor — a kind of incubator in which the windpipe was spun, rotisserie-style, in a nutrient solution — the implant was stitchedinto Mr. Beyene, replacing his cancerous windpipe.
It was such a seemingly wild scheme that Mr. Beyene had his doubts when Dr. Macchiarini first proposed it.
“I told him, I prefer to live three years and then die,” he said. “I almost refused. It had only been done in pigs. But he convinced mein a very scientific way.”
Now, 15 months after the operation, Mr. Beyene, 39, who is from Eritrea, is tumor-free and breathing normally. He is back in Iceland with his wife and two small children, including a 1-year-old boy whom he had thought he would never get to know. In Stockholm earlier this year for afollow-up visit, he showed the long vertical scar on his chest and spoke quietly in English, the raspiness of his voice a leftover fromradiation therapy.
His strength was improving every day,he said, and he couldeven run a little.
“Things are good,” Mr. Beyene said. “Life is much better.”
Imitating Nature
To make an organ, ithelps to know how nature does it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/16/health/research/scientists-make-progress-in-tailor-made-organs.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper&gwh=95B528E82F669198EEBC9D693EF1521D

interesting!
Heard about it some time ago!
Must have progressed quite a bit since!

This actually isn't a first, but the technology is improving.