/ News
'Lego-Stacking' Technique Could Help Scientists Grow Human Organs
By stacking human cells together like Lego blocks, scientists have found a way to create tiny, 3D models of human tissue.
The advance may enable scientists to test customized medicines before injecting them into a patient and, ultimately, to grow whole human organs, the scientists say.
The main difficulty scientists have faced in building organs is properly positioning the many cell types that constitute any given organ tissue. The new technique overcomes that challenge by using fragments of DNA to selectively latch one cell to the next.
"Getting all those communicating cells in place such that only the correct cells are touching and talking to one another is tough. We've figured out a good way of doing that," said Zev Gartner, an associate professor of pharmaceutical chemistry at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and senior author of the study, published today (Aug. 31) in the journal Nature Methods. [Top 3 Techniques for Creating Organs in the Lab]
Gartner said scientists are still years away from growing whole organs to replace diseased ones. But since 2013, scientists have been creating what they call organoids — laboratory-grown and partially functionalminiature organs.
These organoids could be useful not only for studying how nature assembles tissues and organs, but also for testing personalized drugs. For example, Gartner envisions using cells from a breast cancerpatient's mammary glands to build a miniature mammary gland in the lab to test which cancer drugs have the best chance for success.
As a proof of concept, Gartner's team created several kinds of organoids, including capillaries and a human mammary gland, each with hundreds of cells.
Such an organoid lets scientists "ask questions about complex human tissues without needing to do experiments on humans," said Michael Todhunter, who co-led the project with another researcher, Noel Jee, when both were graduate students at UCSF.
There are many cell types in an organ such as a mammary gland — for example, blood vessel cells, fat cells, connective tissue cells called fibroblasts, white blood cells and others. To properly arrange the cells in an organoid, the scientists first created snippets of synthetic, single-strand DNA molecules and embedded them into cell membranes so that each cell became somewhat "hairy," with dangling strands of DNA.
The DNA acted like Velcro stitching. Cells with complementary strands of DNA latched together, while cells with noncomplementary DNA just tumbled by one another. This way, the scientists could control which cells stuck to which.
Layer by layer, the scientists created a three-dimensional organ model. The entire process of building an organoid with hundreds of functional cells took just a few hours, Gartner said.
The scientists call the technique DNA programmed assembly of cells, or DPAC.
However, there are limits that prevent the DPAC technique from churning out whole organs, Gartner noted.
"We can make tissues that span multiple centimeters … and actually have hundreds of thousands of cells — maybe even millions," Gartner said. "However, they can only be around 50 to 100 microns thick," he said. (For comparison, the average human hair is about 100 microns thick.)
The reason the researchers cannot make larger and thicker tissues is that the cells in the interior of the organoid would need oxygen and nutrients that come from blood vessels. "We're working on building functional blood vessels into these tissues," Gartner said. "We can get the right cells in the right positions but haven't figured out how to perfuse them with blood or a substitute efficiently yet."
However, the scientists noted that combining DPAC with 3D-printing and stem-cell technologies could help them begin to tackle some of these limitations.
Follow Christopher Wanjek @wanjek for daily tweets on health and science with a humorous edge. Wanjek is the author of "Food at Work" and "Bad Medicine." His column, Bad Medicine, appears regularly on Live Science.
Source: http://www.livescience.com/52042-lego-stacking-technique-could-help-scientists-grow-human-organs.html
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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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