Linda Sari Hasibuan, CNBC Indonesia
Lifestyle
Tuesday, 12/09/2023 18:20 IWST
Photo: Illustration of a kidney (Photo by Robina Weermeijer on Unsplash)
Jakarta, CNBC Indonesia – Scientists in China have succeeded in growing human organs inside other animals. This is the first discovery in the world that could help overcome the shortage of organ donors.
In a new study published in the journal Cell Stem Cell, Thursday (7/9/2023), researchers inserted human stem cells into genetically modified pig embryos. When these embryos were implanted into surrogate sows, they developed early-stage human kidneys in about 28 days.
According to Live Science, the research is still in its early stages, but the authors say that this technology could one day help alleviate the shortage of human organs needed for transplants.
“Mouse organs have been produced in mice, but previous attempts to grow human organs in pigs have not been successful,” said Liangxue Lai, senior study author and principal investigator at the Guangzhou Institute of Biomedicine and Health, Chinese Academy of Sciences and Wuyi University in a statement.
In previous experiments, scientists took pig kidneys and hearts from genetically modified pigs and transplanted them into brain-dead organ donors, but this strategy carried a high risk that the human body would reject the pig’s organs. This new research aims to limit that problem.
“Our approach enhances the integration of human cells into recipient tissue and allows us to grow human organs in pigs,” said Lai.
Kidneys are one of the most frequently transplanted organs, but the lack of kidney availability means more and more people need them. For example, about 100,000 people in the US were on a waiting list to receive a kidney in 2020, but only 23,000 received one.
One solution is to integrate human stem cells that can develop into any type of cell, called induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), into the embryos of other mammals to create hybrid or chimeric embryos that can grow human organs.
Pigs are a good choice because their organs are similar to humans and so is the development of their embryos. However, the challenge is that pig cells in embryos can easily outcompete human cells and require different nutrients and chemical signals to grow.
In the new study, researchers addressed this challenge by using CRISPR technology to disable two genes that normally allow pig embryo cells to develop kidneys. This creates oranges that must be filled by human iPSCs.
The researchers also manipulated human iPSCs so that they were more likely to integrate with pig cells by matching their developmental stages. Without this adjustment, human cell development would be more advanced than pig cells.
The team implanted 1,820 chimeric embryos into 13 surrogate sows and then terminated the pregnancies and extracted the embryos about a month later. Of these, five embryos contained early stage kidneys consisting of approximately 50% to 60% human cells and were structurally normal for this stage of development.
They contain cells that will eventually become the ureters, tube-like structures that connect the kidneys to the bladder.
Scientists confirmed that the human cells in the embryos were mostly located in the kidneys, not in other embryonic tissues, such as sex cells or nerve cells. This could raise ethical questions if these cells were allowed to reach maturity in baby pigs.
This technology still needs a long time to be applied to human organ transplantation. One crucial hurdle is the problem of immune rejection, because the kidneys created by the team still contain cells that come from pigs, such as the cells that form blood vessels.
A large number of pig embryos also experienced setbacks in this study, so the efficiency of this process needs to be addressed with future research.
Meanwhile, the team hopes these findings can improve our understanding of human organ development and disease progression.
“Before we get to the final stage of creating organs that can be stored for clinical practice, this method provides an opportunity to study human development,” said Miguel Esteban, study author and principal investigator at the Guangzhou Institute of Biomedicine and Medicine.
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2023-09-12 11:20:22
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