What if organ transplant recipients didn’t have to wait for a donor? What if we could grow healthy copies of organs from scratch? And what if we could grow those organs in a fish tank?
That’s the technology Michael Riddle was trying to create in 2010 when he was a medical student at the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB). Riddle, who now leads regenerative medicine company Mesogen, recently told Popular Mechanics about his med school experiment, and how he sold the results of his innovation to a major equipment manufacturer.
How do you build a new lung?
According to Riddle, in his fourth year of medical school, he had the opportunity to choose a rotation at UTMB’s Regenerative Medicine Laboratory, which at the time was attempting to grow mouse and rat lungs using stem cells.
The process begins by taking an original organ and “decellularising” it, per Popular Mechanics. That means removing cells but leaving a biological structure in place. Then, the researcher incentivises the cells to re-grow, using cells from the person or animal who is supposed to receive the new organ.
Though these experiments produced exciting positive results, Riddle wondered why the lab wasn’t trying to grow human lungs – or pig lungs, which are similar in size.
“They told me that it took 5 months to decellularise a large pig lung manually and there was no bioreactor available that was big enough to grow it with stem cells once it had been decellularised,” he writes on LinkedIn.
To build a big enough bioreactor – essentially an incubator – Riddle bought a fish tank from a pet store and other equipment from eBay and Lowes. He assembled the necessary technology and computing power and tested if it could fit a pig lung. It was able to do so, according to his LinkedIn post.
However when Riddle went to test the tank, he found that the lung floated and crimped, which made it difficult to recirculate new cells. So, he ended up suspending the lung upside down using a tube and floated in the solution designed to help it build new cells. It worked.
Then, as he writes on LinkedIn, he got a call from Harvard Apparatus, a major medical equipment manufacturer. Riddle ended up selling them the design, per Popular Mechanics.
Riddle’s company now focuses on building medical products that use the body’s own cells to regrow new organs or parts of the body, according to the outlet. The enterprise is currently focused on treating macular degeneration and Type 1 Diabetes, per its site.
What are the pros of regrowing organs?
When a person receives an organ transplant, they must take drugs that suppress their immune system so the body does not attack the newcomer. It is also very difficult to transplant organs, and many organs encounter issues during the transplant process. On top of that, people languish on waiting lists to wait for someone to die in a way that preserves their insides – usually, as Grey’s Anatomy taught us, in a car accident.
Many of these issues could be avoided by growing fresh organs – from a patient’s own cells – outside of the body. Removing the poignant agony of the transplant list and process might leave fewer dramatic plotlines for writers like Shonda Rhimes to toy with, but it would be better for everyone, in all likelihood, if it worked.
That doesn’t mean that every organ grown in a bioreactor is ready to be dropped in a body. Some regrow but aren’t strong enough to pump blood, for example, according to the outlet. But it’s certainly an innovative step forward in biotechnology. – Inc./Tribune News Service
