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Lab-grown kidneys transplanted into rats
Scientists at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston have fitted rats with kidneys that were grown in a lab from stripped-down kidney scaffolds. When transplanted, these 'bioengineered' organs starting filtering the rodents’ blood and making urine.
The team, led by organ-regeneration specialist Harald Ott, started with the kidneys of recently deceased rats and used detergent to strip away the cells, leaving behind the underlying scaffold of connective tissues such as the structural components of blood vessels. They then regenerated the organ by seeding this scaffold with two cell types: human umbilical-vein cells to line the blood vessels, and kidney cells from newborn rats to produce the other tissues that make up the organ. The work is described today in Nature Medicine 1. Ott and his colleagues developed this method in 2008, and he has since used it to grow hearts 2 and lungs.
“This study reports important milestones toward engineering replacement kidney grafts [and] shows the potential for this strategy,” says urologist Anthony Atala, who directs the Institute for Regenerative Medicine at Wake Forest School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
“If the work can be replicated, the scientists involved have clearly accomplished a tour de force and deserve accolades,” adds William Fissell, a nephrologist at the University of California, San Francisco.
Currently, patients who develop the most severe forms of kidney disease can be kept alive with dialysis, but only a transplant will cure them. And in the United States alone, around 100,000 people are waiting for a donor kidney.
Other research groups have used tissue-engineering techniques to develop external kidney-assisting devices using human cells, and some have already passed early clinical trials3, 4. But Ott argues that his bioengineered kidneys, although much farther behind in development, have the benefit of being implantable just like a donor organ.
The connective scaffold of a rat kidney, seeded with human endothelial and rat kidney cells, growing in an organ bioreactor.
Organs on demand
If he and his team can scale up their technique to produce human kidneys, they could provide ready-made, genetically tailored organs that would be much less likely to be rejected by a patient’s immune system. The scaffolds could come from existing donors — with no need for a genetic match — or perhaps even from animals, such as pigs. In some cases, bioengineers might be able to strip the patient's own diseased kidney and rebuild it.
“In an ideal world, if someone walks into the hospital and has a kidney grown on demand, there’s no donor organ shortage and there are no immune problems,” Ott says.
Ott’s method preserves the kidney’s three-dimensional architecture, blood-vessel structure and molecules that help to guide and organize growing cells. For example, the team saw that cells called podocytes largely ended up in the right place in their engineered organs — around blood-filtering structures called glomeruli.
However, the resulting organs are far from ready for the clinic. When transplanted into rats, they produced only around one-third as much urine as normal kidneys, and cleared creatinine — a waste product of muscles that is used to assess kidney health — 36 times more slowly than normal.
Ott blames this poor performance on the immaturity of the engineered organs, and the fact that they probably had not created the full gamut of cell types found in adult kidneys. But he notes that many patients with kidney disease start dialysis only when their kidney function falls below 15%. “If we can make a graft that works at 20%, that would already make patients independent of haemodialysis,” he says.
The team is now testing the same technique using pig and human kidneys. They are also developing more sophisticated ways of steering the development of the seeded cells, and Ott is hoping that his latest publication will attract interest from other biologists. “We’ll need collaborators, and a lot more brain power chiming in,” he says.
A regenerated kidney that could be implanted in humans “remains very, very far in the future”, says Fissell. “In almost every area in medicine, the leap from rodent to man has been extraordinarily difficult, and that has seemed to be the case with organ scaffolds as well.” However, he says that the team’s work still provides a platform for understanding how kidneys develop and repair themselves. “This may end up being the area in which the paper has the most impact,” Fissell says.
Source: http://www.nature.com/news/lab-grown-kidneys-transplanted-into-rats-1.12791
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Founded by Russian entrepreneur Dmitry Itskov in February 2011 with the participation of leading Russian specialists in the field of neural interfaces, robotics, artificial organs and systems.
The main goals of the 2045 Initiative: the creation and realization of a new strategy for the development of humanity which meets global civilization challenges; the creation of optimale conditions promoting the spiritual enlightenment of humanity; and the realization of a new futuristic reality based on 5 principles: high spirituality, high culture, high ethics, high science and high technologies.
The main science mega-project of the 2045 Initiative aims to create technologies enabling the transfer of a individual’s personality to a more advanced non-biological carrier, and extending life, including to the point of immortality. We devote particular attention to enabling the fullest possible dialogue between the world’s major spiritual traditions, science and society.
A large-scale transformation of humanity, comparable to some of the major spiritual and sci-tech revolutions in history, will require a new strategy. We believe this to be necessary to overcome existing crises, which threaten our planetary habitat and the continued existence of humanity as a species. With the 2045 Initiative, we hope to realize a new strategy for humanity's development, and in so doing, create a more productive, fulfilling, and satisfying future.
The "2045" team is working towards creating an international research center where leading scientists will be engaged in research and development in the fields of anthropomorphic robotics, living systems modeling and brain and consciousness modeling with the goal of transferring one’s individual consciousness to an artificial carrier and achieving cybernetic immortality.
An annual congress "The Global Future 2045" is organized by the Initiative to give platform for discussing mankind's evolutionary strategy based on technologies of cybernetic immortality as well as the possible impact of such technologies on global society, politics and economies of the future.
Future prospects of "2045" Initiative for society
2015-2020
The emergence and widespread use of affordable android "avatars" controlled by a "brain-computer" interface. Coupled with related technologies “avatars’ will give people a number of new features: ability to work in dangerous environments, perform rescue operations, travel in extreme situations etc.
Avatar components will be used in medicine for the rehabilitation of fully or partially disabled patients giving them prosthetic limbs or recover lost senses.
2020-2025
Creation of an autonomous life-support system for the human brain linked to a robot, ‘avatar’, will save people whose body is completely worn out or irreversibly damaged. Any patient with an intact brain will be able to return to a fully functioning bodily life. Such technologies will greatly enlarge the possibility of hybrid bio-electronic devices, thus creating a new IT revolution and will make all kinds of superimpositions of electronic and biological systems possible.
2030-2035
Creation of a computer model of the brain and human consciousness with the subsequent development of means to transfer individual consciousness onto an artificial carrier. This development will profoundly change the world, it will not only give everyone the possibility of cybernetic immortality but will also create a friendly artificial intelligence, expand human capabilities and provide opportunities for ordinary people to restore or modify their own brain multiple times. The final result at this stage can be a real revolution in the understanding of human nature that will completely change the human and technical prospects for humanity.
2045
This is the time when substance-independent minds will receive new bodies with capacities far exceeding those of ordinary humans. A new era for humanity will arrive! Changes will occur in all spheres of human activity – energy generation, transportation, politics, medicine, psychology, sciences, and so on.
Today it is hard to imagine a future when bodies consisting of nanorobots will become affordable and capable of taking any form. It is also hard to imagine body holograms featuring controlled matter. One thing is clear however: humanity, for the first time in its history, will make a fully managed evolutionary transition and eventually become a new species. Moreover, prerequisites for a large-scale expansion into outer space will be created as well.
Key elements of the project in the future
• International social movement
• social network immortal.me
• charitable foundation "Global Future 2045" (Foundation 2045)
• scientific research centre "Immortality"
• business incubator
• University of "Immortality"
• annual award for contribution to the realization of the project of "Immortality”.
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