How to save the worldA global journey into making our lives better…

The availability of organ transplant is a subject of major concern today: every 30 seconds, a patient dies from diseases that could be treated with tissue replacement. In the last decade, the number of patients on the waiting list for a transplant doubled, but there has been no increase in available organs.

And these statistics do not even start to consider people who have an amputated limb. Each year, thousands of children are mutilated by landmines in countries such as Cambodia or Angola, thousands suffer amputation, a majority of which is due to vascular issues but we cannot ignore armed conflicts and road accidents as other causes.

Yet there is hope. Really amazing new technologies are arriving very quickly, as you will see in the video below. We cannot quite reproduce a whole leg overnight yet, but there exist working solutions for most of the essential organs.

Salamanders can regenerate a whole arm in a matter of weeks. Dr. Anthony Atala, pioneer of regenerative medicine at the Wake Forest Institute, explains that human body has the potential to do the same, but instead seal itself to prefent infection. Although the body can naturally regenerate on small scales, it is clearly insufficient in many cases.

Using “smart bio-materials”, one can build a “bridge” between bits of tissues and then encourage regrowth over a maximum distance of roughly a centimetre. This ways blood vessels, urethras… can be regrown.

For larger and more complex organs, such as muscles, this first approach doesn’t really work. The idea developed then is to take a small piece of tissue from the organ to replicate, grow them outside the body and add them on a complex scaffold of smart bio-degradable bio-materials. It is then placed into a reactor and grown into a working organ, and trained if applicable, before being transplanted back into the patient’s body.

In this video, Dr Atala demonstrate an impressing list of achievement using this technique. Researchers at the institute have been able to rebuild muscles, urethras, bladders, heart valve, ears, fingers… they are now researching into more complex organs such as the heart, the liver or the kidneys, and have even developed and experimental “heart printing device” based on a desktop printer which can recreate a working heart in 6 hours!!

This is a whole new field of medicine which hold great promises. As added benefits, such technology may decrease the waiting list for an organ, remove the need for immuno-suppressants and close many ethical debates on embryonic stem-cell research.