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Sunday, April 21, 2013

Scientists make functioning rat kidneys in laboratory.


The New York Times (4/15, A10, Fountain, Subscription Publication, 1.68M) reports, "Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston have made functioning rat kidneys in the laboratory, a bioengineering achievement that may one day lead to the ability to create replacement organs for people with kidney disease." The researchers "said the rat kidneys produced urine in the laboratory as well as when transplanted into rats."
        The Los Angeles Times (4/14, Brown, 692K) "Science Now" blog reports, "The advance could be good news for the 100,000 Americans waiting for donor kidneys for transplant, because it suggests that someday scientists might be able to grow custom-made kidneys for people, using a patient's own cells to seed tissues, said Dr. Harald Ott, a researcher at the Massachusetts General Hospital Center for Regenerative Medicine and senior author of a paper describing the discovery published online Sunday in the journal Nature Medicine."
        Bloomberg News (4/15, Lopatto) reports, "Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston stripped donor organs of kidney cells with a chemical bath, leaving a physical scaffold behind made up largely of proteins." The scientists "then repopulated the structure with cells from both newborn rats and humans, and allowed the cells to grow in an incubator." Although "the resulting organs weren't as efficient as natural ones, they kept the kidney's physical shape allowing transplant, the study reported."
        The Boston Globe (4/15, Johnson, 250K) reports, "Five years ago, Ott described the technique, in a paper with the alluring subtitle, 'using nature's platform to engineer a bioartificial heart.'" When Ott was "a research fellow at the University of Minnesota, he had discovered that flushing a rat's heart with a detergent, such as one found in shampoo, could remove the living cells from the organ and leave behind a collagen matrix."

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