The Washington Post
Scientists in Massachusetts have used cells derived from cloned cow embryos to grow kidneylike organs that function and are not rejected when implanted into adult cows, marking the first use of cloning technology to grow personalized, genetically matched organs for transplantation.
The research, described in an interview Tuesday by the scientist who led the work, has not been published in a scientific journal or confirmed by others. And although the organs can apparently remove toxins from the body and produce urine, it’s not known if they can perform all of the many jobs for which kidneys are responsible.
But if the approach can be used to make human kidneys from cloned human embryos, as the Massachusetts team expects, it could dramatically reduce the need for donor kidneys and transplants in the future, experts said.
While the new work remains preliminary, the cow study is the first to indicate that cells taken from a newly created clone can be made to grow and work together as an apparently functioning organ and be accepted by the body’s immune system as scientists have predicted.
"We can say clearly that these kidneys produced urine and survived for several months inside the cows," said Robert Lanza, chief scientist on the project at Advanced Cell Technology in Worcester, Mass. "This is proof of principle that therapeutic cloning can work."
Therapeutic cloning is an experimental and still largely theoretical approach to treating degenerative diseases in which replacement tissues would be grown for patients from embryos that were genetic clones of those patients.
Since the replacement tissues would be genetically identical to the patient, they would not be rejected by the patient’s immune system. But the approach is controversial because it requires the production and preordained destruction of cloned human embryos.
In the latest experiments, the team grew the cloned embryos to an early fetal stage, at which point they were able to identify immature cells starting to turn into kidney cells, Lanza said.
Working with Anthony Atallah at Boston Children’s Hospital, they seeded some of those immature renal cells onto a spongelike, 2-inch-long biocompatible scaffolding. As the cells matured and colonized that structure, the mass came to resemble — and function like — a miniature kidney.
The team implanted several of the mini-organs under the skin of at least one cow. Lanza would not reveal how many kidneys were made or cows used.
Vessels spontaneously grew into the organs, supplying them with blood. And the kidneys produced urine, which drained into small synthetic bags, or bladders, the scientists had attached to the kidneys under the skin.
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