Growing entire replacement organs from scratch is one of the “holy grails” of medicine, and scientists from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland have for the first time done just that. It’s not a lung or a heart, but a mouse thymus, a gland that helps produce the immune system’s T-cells. Nevertheless, the achievement heralds a new age when growing replacement organs is a common procedure.
The team took embryonic mouse fibroblast cells and successfully reprogrammed them into thymus cells. Tests in a lab showed that the morphed cells perform the correct functions of normal thymus cells. These were then prepared with other thymus cell types and delivered into a mouse model. Amazingly, the cells formed into a normal thymus, exhibiting the same functionality and structure that the organ normally has.
Here’s Professor Clare Blackburn, the lead author of the paper in Nature Cell Biology, describing the new technology:
Study in Nature Cell Biology: An organized and functional thymus generated from FOXN1-reprogrammed fibroblasts…
Press release: Living organ grown from lab-created cells…