How Close Are We to Farming Human Body Parts?

Key Takeaways

[Music] right now scientists are attempting to grow ears kidneys blood vessels livers even hearts in fact at the moment there are some people walking around with lab-grown bladders but this is rare in the US over 80% of transplanted organs come from the deceased the rest are donated by the living except for a small number that are grown in laboratories however this could all change fairly soon in the not-too-distant future you might have a spare heart kidney or liver grown for you in a lab and someday there could be warehouses filled with new organs so how close are we to farming human body parts [Music] last year there was a record number of organ transplants in the United States over 30,000 which does sound like a lot but the waiting list for organ donation is over 100 thousand there just aren't enough organs to go around in a 20-year period the actual number of patients on the transplant list has gone up six-fold 600 percent so really there's a dire need for organs for patients at the moment the main way to get an organ is from a donor but what if we could just cook up our own from scratch we have place lap grown organs into patients already we have a number of tissues that we have implanted into patients and goal is to increase the number of patients that can benefit from these technologies and dr. Atala knows he led the team that developed the first lab-grown organ to be transplanted into a human back in 2006 it was a bladder which to be fair is a pretty simple structure but what about organs that are more complex each of them actually even ones that may look simple have their unique challenges to them there are some things which are harder to make than others for example there's a little complexity as we look at tissues with flat structures such as skin between the least complex they're flat mostly one major cell type tubular structures like blood vessels for the second level of complexity hello non tubular organs like the stomach the bladder or the third level complexity and by far the most complex or the solid organs like the heart or the liver as they get more complex in terms of the numbers of cells involved and the structural features the complexity of those the brain is certainly one that many people that I think would say is among the list of higher tissues or organs to try and create [Music] now there are scientists who are working on growing brains in the lab but so far they've only produced miniature partially functioning brains about the size of a piece of popcorn but these are being grown to implant into humans they're being used for medical testing like seeing how Zika virus affects the human brain now how are scientists doing all this well growing organs and organ tissue comes down to our good friend the stem cell stem cells are the basis of all cells in our body they're like children and can grow up to be anything to grow a tissue or an organ one of the very first challenges to overcome is really how to get the cells to grow the pluripotent has the potential at the earliest state to turn into heart and liver and lung and not just the tissue but all the different cell types the heart muscle cells the blood vessel cells all of those necessary cells that you need to form a complex tissue or be our old friend the stem cell is powerful it's already being used to grow things like skin and tracheas one thing we're interested in is using the power of stem cells to try and grow or coax the cells to form the tissues largely on their own so what are the minimal hues the minimal information we need to provide to let them do something that they're already capable of doing but we want to know about growing a complete organ or let's say an entire farm of organs and that's where things get a little crazy right now scientists are creating organs and body parts using 3d printers they make a biocompatible plastic scaffold stem cells are placed onto it and then they pop that whole thing into an incubator that mimics the conditions of the human body so the 3d printers were really trying many different types of tissues we use basically your typical imaging software program that's available every major hospital where you can really three dimensionally configure what you're in really looks like and then to develop our own software program that can then download the information for an x-ray and then you can print a structure to fit that specific defect in that patient while we can print simple structures solid organs are more complex Engineers need to figure out how to connect blood vessels and tissues within the same organ which ain't easy the most difficult organs to create are the solid organs but the future really is can we actually create structures that we can put in to either augment or replace these solid organs then we have to overcome another huge obstacle even if we can make these organs how can we produce them on a large enough scale to farm them how do we meet the demand of thousands and thousands of patients it's a process that could take decades so realistically speaking I think that widespread manufacturing and availability of large organs that are produced in a lab or reactor setting we're still a long ways away because of some of the challenges that we face in growing them reproducibly to that size where I see in the shorter term success five 10 year period is that can we make small pieces of them can make lots of them in terms of solid organs is still going to be a while in terms of the less complex organs such as flat tubular and Hollow not tubular organs were already there we're putting these into patients now one of the big ones the moment is the manufacturing can you make enough of this and can you make it repeatedly enough so that it's deemed safe you can't just make it once and have it be very different the next time that's not acceptable so we've come a long way but seeing row upon row of hearts livers and kidneys being grown delivered to you via drone that's still the stuff of sci-fi for sure so take care of that liver or don't Who am I your dad if you want more of these videos vote by subscribing here and did you know scientists are trying to take a photograph of an actual black hole everyone you've ever seen is fake tap here to see how close we are to one of the coolest photos humans have ever taken and thanks for watching secret