After decades of work, a team of doctors say they’ve successfully engineered vaginas that have been implanted and grown in women. The vaginas were grown in a lab from the female patients’ own cells and later transferred to their bodies, where they formed into normal vaginas. The breakthrough bears some huge implications, too.
It’s a pumping lung in a box, basically. Al Jazeera America specifies that its more properly known as the Organ Care System (OCS) but it’s basically a human donor long being kept alive and breathing out of the body inside a box. The OCS machine is used to keep the blood and oxygen flowing to the donor organ so that it can buy itself more time before the donor organ is given to the recipient.
     |
What you’re looking at is a cat lung being blown up with a straw. I know. It’s ginormous. More ginormous than what you would think is inside a cat. But that’s because lungs are incredibly expandable. What looks like a pile of bloody meat inflates into this perfectly pink balloon.
| |
For the very first time, scientists have managed to create tiny, embryonic brains in test tubes. Say hello to baby Frankenstein.
| |
Handpainted by Miss Insomnia Tulip for this October’s annual Eat Your Heart Out food fest, these offal-inspired vanilla-flavored macaron cookies achieve just the right balance of anatomical correctness and playful artistic interpretation.
Printing a chocolate heart is easy enough, but how about an actual organ? There are folks working on it, but it turns out those veins of yours aren’t exactly a breeze to replicate. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and MIT may have found a semi-sweet solution — dissolving a sugar lattice in a batch of living Jell-O. The research team uses a RepRap 3D printer and a custom extruder head to print a filament network composed of sucrose, glucose and dextran which is later encased in a bio-gel containing living cells. Once the confectionery paths are dissolved, they leave a network of artery-like channels in their void. Tissue living in the gel can then receive oxygen and nutrients through the hollow pipes.
The research has been promising so far, and has increased the number of functional liver cells the team has been able to maintain in artificial tissues. These results suggest the technique could have future research possibilities in developing lab-grown organs. MIT Professor Sangeeta Bhatia, who helped conduct the effort, hopes to push the group’s work further. “More work will be needed to learn how to directly connect these types of vascular networks to natural blood vessels while at the same time investigating fundamental interactions between the liver cells and the patterned vasculature. It’s an exciting future ahead.” Scientists at other labs could also get their mitts on the sweet templates since they’re stable enough to endure shipping. Head past the break for a video of the innard infrastructure.
Researchers use 3D printer, sugar, to create a fake artery network for lab-grown tissue originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 03 Jul 2012 04:07:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Permalink 
Hack a Day | 
Nature, University of Pennsylvania | Email this | Comments
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
