In a novel study US medical experts have successfully grown the world’s first tissue-engineered urethras or urinary tubes by using patient’s own cells. The surgeons have used the lab-grown urethras to treat five Mexican boys suffering damaged urinary tracts. The grafts have taken and repaired the defects of the sufferers and they are fit now.
In the tissue engineering process the first step was taking a small sample of cells from the bladder of each of the sufferer. With the help of those samples researchers segregated the cells they would require to grow the new structure which drives out urine from the bladder.
Those cells are required to generate muscle, lining and supportive tissue and were cultivated and proliferated in the laboratory for several weeks till they were abundant enough to perform the job. They were then positioned onto a biodegradable mesh that was formed into a tube and sized to be a perfect fit for the patient.
After duration of one week of incubation that allows the cells to take to the mesh, then lab-grown grafts were surgically transplanted into the patients. The urethra looks and functions similar to normal urethra and six years after the graft study patients are doing well.
Completely grown in the lab, these urethras, living tubes which transmit urine from the bladder, emphasize the power of cell-based therapies. When an organ or tissue is irreparably damaged or traumatically destroyed, no amount of drugs or mechanical devices will restore the patient back to normal, explained Prof Chris Mason, an expert on regenerative medicine from University College London.
If the target is cure, then cell-based treatments are the answer. Using living cells as drugs is a key step-change in clinical practice. Cell-based therapies go with drugs and devices by aiming to cure the large unmet medical needs of the generation, counting blindness, diabetes, heart failure, Parkinson’s disease and stroke, added Prof Mason.
Professor Anthony Atala, director of Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine in Winston-Salem, North Carolina and team are presently working to engineer more than thirty diverse surrogate tissues and organs, reported the study published in the Lancet.