Scientists have produced a lab-grown kidney for a rat that performs everything a natural one does, paving the way for a synthetic kidney to soon be made from a patient's own skin cells for human transplant.
Several labs are competing to develop the most efficient method to produce the most functional organs through such futuristic techniques as 3D printing, which has already yielded a lab-made kidney that works in lab rodents, or through a "bioreactor" that slowly infuses cells onto the rudimentary scaffold of a kidney, as in the latest study.
Researchers created the synthetic kidney using a similar bioengineering process to the one that led to the manufacture of artificial human windpipes, the first of which was transplanted into a Spanish woman with a collapsed trachea in 2008.
The study, published in the journal Nature Medicine, suggests a process that may one day be used to help rebuild kidneys for people in renal failure, said Harald Ott, the study's senior author. As many as 10 percent of about of about 100,000 Americans awaiting a kidney transplant as of April 5 will die before getting a transplant, the authors wrote.
"The resulting graft can be transplanted just like a donor kidney," Ott said in a statement. "If this technology can be scaled to human-sized grafts, patients suffering from renal failure who are currently waiting for donor kidneys or who are not transplant candidates could theoretically receive new organs derived from their own cells."
