The Engineering of Kidney Organoids Proceeds Apace

This is the organoid era of tissue engineering. Researchers are making earnest progress in establishing the recipes that allow cells to be grown into small, functional tissue sections. They lack a network of capillaries, however, so must be no more than a millimeter or so in thickness in order for nutrients to perfuse sufficiently through the tissue to support all of its cells. Every organ, every tissue has a significantly different recipe, but it is usually something that can be derived from an examination of the biochemistry of embryonic growth, with enough time and funding. Given the large number of different tissues versus the smaller number of research groups working on tissue engineering, this process of discovery will be going on for a while yet. It has taken a great deal of time and effort to produce the first functional organoids, and it will take longer yet to manage complete coverage of the human body. Today I'll point out a couple of recent articles that focus on kidney organoids specifically. Kidney function is not independent of structure and location as is the case for the liver, so one can't just put kidney organoids into a patient's lymph nodes, as Lygenesis is doing with liver sections. It is nonetheless plausible to transplant some number of kidney organoids into a failing kidney and have them integrate usefully to support overall kidney function. It may be the case that this becomes a widespread mode of therapy before a reliable solution is found fo...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs