By Chase Wilson ’17

In recent years, the field of regenerative medicine has seen landmark advances. Scientists have been able to grow and implement organs from a lab into human patients. They have implanted blood vessels, tear ducts and windpipes, but they aren’t stopping there. The University of Texas Medical Branch is working to rebuild lung tissue. A Dr. Alex Seifalian and his team in London are trying to regrow a human heart.

The regenerative field was pioneered by Sir Roy Calne, a British surgeon who figured out how to use drugs to suppress the body’s immune system from rejecting transplanted organs in the 1950s. His work was profound. Since then, laboratories have sprouted anywhere from basements of hospitals in Madrid to a college campus in Texas. Since the discovery, scientists have come up with ways to improve on the methods of transplanting organs.

New advances may even eliminate human donor transplantation from the profession completely by actually growing the necessary organ from the patient’s own stem cells. By using this method, scientists are able to avoid possible fatal situations in which the body rejects a transplanted organ from another person. Even if the transplant procedure is a success, the organ receiver is required to take medication that suppresses their immune system, giving them an increased risk of disease and infection.

Many doctors researching regenerative organs envision a future where a patient will not have to be placed on an organ transplant list and wait for their potentially life saving surgery, a future that allows doctors to grow a vein needed for artery bypass procedures instead of using one from the patient’s arm or leg. The payoff could be greater than that, though; doctors expect heart repair to be a multi-billion dollar industry due to the growing demand for cardiovascular parts and the lack of donors.

A team of scientists and biologists at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston have succeeded in growing human lungs from the remnants of those of a deceased cadaver. The process they used consisted of stripping the lungs of living cells in a solution, which leaves what scientists call the “skeleton of the organ.” Scientists embed stem cells into the skeleton and place both of them into a nutritious solution.

The solution provides the cells with the right amounts of each nutrient so that the cells will grow in the right direction and in the right orientation to form the organ. After four weeks of immersion, the team had a complete human set of lungs. After their first experiment was a success they replicated it with another pair. Hopefully, in the near future, scientists may well have developed the means for humans to rebuild themselves.