Making organ donation a thing of the past !!

'This is a nose we’re growing for a patient next month,’ Professor Alexander Seifalian says matter-of-factly, plucking a Petri dish from the bench beside him.

Inside is an utterly lifelike appendage, swimming in red goo. Alongside it is another dish containing an ear.

‘It’s a world first,’ he says smiling.

‘Nobody has ever grown a nose before.’

His lab is little more than a series of worn wooden desktops strewn with beakers, solutions, taps, medical jars, tubing and paperwork, and looks like a school chemistry lab.

But it’s from here that Seifalian leads University College London’s (UCL) Department of Nanotechnology and Regenerative Medicine, which he jokingly calls the ‘human body parts store’. 

As he takes me on a tour of his lab I’m bombarded with one medical breakthrough after another.

At one desk he picks up a glass mould that shaped the trachea – windpipe – used in the world’s first synthetic organ transplant.

At another are the ingredients for the revolutionary nanomaterial at the heart of his creations, and just beyond that is a large machine with a pale, gossamer-thin cable inside that’s pulsing with what looks like a heartbeat. It’s an artery.

‘We are the first in the world working on this,’ Seifalian says casually.

‘We can make a metre every 20 seconds if we need to.’

‘Other groups have tried to tackle nose replacement with implants but we’ve found they don’t last,’ says Adelola Oseni, one of Seifalian’s team.

‘They migrate, the shape of the nose changes. But our one will hold itself completely, as it’s an entire nose shape made out of polymer.’

Looking like very thin Latex rubber, the polymer is made up of billions of molecules, each measuring just over one nanometre (a billionth of a metre), or 40,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair. Working at molecular level allows the material itself to be intricately detailed.

‘Inside this nanomaterial are thousands of small holes,’ says Seifalian.

‘Tissue grows into these and becomes part of it. It becomes the same as a nose and will even feel like one.’

When the nose is transferred to the patient, it doesn’t go directly onto the face but will be placed inside a balloon inserted beneath the skin on their arm.

After four weeks, during which time skin and blood vessels can grow, the nose can be monitored, then it can be transplanted to the face.

At the cutting edge of modern medicine, Seifalian and his team are focusing on growing replacement organs and body parts to order using a patient’s own cells. There would be no more waiting for donors or complex reconstruction – just a quick swap. And because the organ is made from the patient’s own cells, the risk of rejection should, in theory, be eliminated.......

....The UK is at the forefront of this research, with work on a £54 million MRC Centre for Regenerative Medicine in Edinburgh completed earlier this year.

Until recently, regenerative medicine focused mostly on embryonic stem cells as these were the most versatile. They are called pluripotent, meaning they have the ability to become any cell type – blood, muscle, etc. By contrast, adult stem cells can replicate themselves endlessly, but only as the cell they began life as – skin cells replicate as skin cells, muscle cells as muscle cells.But the moral debate surrounding embryonic stem cell research is controversial. Stem cells are taken from human embryos, which are destroyed in the process. Despite the protests of pro-life groups, the UK government has supported stem-cell research since 2002, giving the UK a head start over other major players in the field like the U.S., where debate over the ethics of the process has delayed research, funding and progress.

Source: MailOnline (dailymail.co.uk )
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