Today in decellularization news: good news for rats.

Bioengineered Rat Kidney

Scientists at Massachusetts General Hospital have built a functional engineered rat kidney, washed clean of its former cells and re-seeded with fresh ones, and transplanted it into a live rat. The engineered kidney can produce urine and expel it through a ureter, and it didn't produce any blood clots.

The fact that it actually worked -- it produced urine -- is a major breakthrough for tissue engineering, which faces probably its greatest challenge with the all-important kidney. The team also washed out a human and a pig kidney, although those weren't transplanted.

Previously, previously, previously, previously.

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2 Responses:

  1. nooj says:

    Cool! It's notoriously hard to accomplish this step! Often, you spend years or decades designing a tissue-forming process which makes organs that work great in a lab and not so great in an animal.

    I hope this becomes successful. Dialysis is sucky.

  2. Leonardo Herrera says:

    For some reason I first read that last sentence as "The humans also..."

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