A team of researchers who grew kidneys in rats to be transplanted in humans as part of a privately funded study are being questioned about the ethics of their practice.
The team obtained human fetal kidneys from Stem Express, a Placerville, Calif.-based company that supplies researchers with tissue from deceased adults and fetuses. The fetal tissue donors gave consent for the kidneys to be used in research. However, the scientists were not part of the donation process, reported Live Science.
When the scientists transplanted the kidneys into adult rats they survived for an average of four months.
In the short term, the scientists hope to test drugs that can't normally be tested by living human beings on the rats with human kidneys. Eventually they hope to put the human fetal kidneys in larger animals, such as pigs, so they can be transplanted back into humans who are in need of a new organ, reported Live Science.
"Our long-term goal is to grow human organs in animals, to end the human donor shortage," study co-author Eugene Gu, a medical student at Duke University and the founder and CEO of Ganogen, Inc., a biotech company in Redwood City, Calif., told Live Science.
The researchers say that by growing human fetal kidneys in rats they can also test drugs on them before human trials are started.
More than 123,000 people in the U.S. are on a waiting list for an organ transplant, according to the American Transplant Foundation.
Although the scientists had good intentions in their study, they are being questioned on a number of ethical issues.
Since the study was published Wednesday in the American Journal of Transplantation, issues have been raised in regards to using human fetal organs in research, putting human organs in animals and the issue of oversight of kidney transplants in the animals.
"All donors are properly consented through an Institutional Review Board (IRB) consent, and donors are made aware of the potential use of any sample that we collect," Cate Dyer, CEO and founder of Stem Express, the company that provided the kidneys for the study, told Live Science.
Hank Greely, an ethical and legal expert on biomedical science at Stanford Law School, also told Live Science that transplanting human organs into animals is something that scientists "do a lot" so they can study the human parts outside of a human.
