tissues said:
when will he log on/see this?
Now! In my opinion over the next century or so we will get better and better at regenerating organs (either
in vivo or
in vitro). Already there have been some great successes at creating decellularised extra cellular matrixes, seeding a patients cells on them and transplanting it back into the patient. Dr Martin Birchall recently did just that with a http://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/news-articles/1003/10031903.
As mishrashubham said IPS cells are an exciting new avenue of research, current problems include the low efficacy of converting somatic cells to IPS cells as well as potential issues with oncogenesis. However recent advances in reprogramming techniques by
Kaji et al show great promise for reliably creating IPS cells in high numbers at low risk. Indeed recently I was at a conference where a professor from the University of Nottingham (unfortunately his name escapes me so for now I don't have a link) gave a presentation showing a large automated machine that his lab has built designed to produce IPS cell cultures 24/7. Somatic cells get put into one end and over the course of weeks the machine monitors hundreds of flasks at once at various time points before giving out what should be IPS cells at the end. At the moment it has great problems with efficacy and isn't actually being used yet to culture IPS cells (they're experimenting with primary and mulipotent cells atm) but it's an amazing glimpse at what might be. Another professor gave a presentation on the idea of creating customisable
cell culture mediums that contain the necessary factors to program a specific cell type to another specific type.
To reliably create tissues and organs we are going to have to radically improve our knowledge of how cells respond to the various characteristics of their environment (such as ECM formation, substrate stiffness, ph, o2 concentration etc etc). As time goes on we will hopefully be able to make more sophisticated
tissue engineering scaffolds that can either be seeded with the patients cells and grown into a fully formed tissue
in vitro (for transplant) or placed directly into the patient to grow tissue
in situ.
Timespans are notoriously hard to predict in science but if I had to bet I would say that we won't look back in the future and point to the year these technologies came out. Rather bit by bit the technology will be developed for specific treatments until eventually we have a full toolkit able to deal with pretty much any condition. Already we've seen things like the trachea example but skin treatments such as
Dermagraft and http://www.eurosurgical.co.uk/matriderm.asp[/URL] or bone treatments using http://www.novabone.com/NB/index.html are already entering the market. Personally I'm hoping that by the time I'm old age (not for at least 40-50 years thankfully) the majority of organs will be made to order, but that's more a wish than a prediction.
EDIT: Forgot to mention that as well as the two types of stem cells mishrashubham mentioned we also have adult stem cells. They aren't pluripotent but being able to take multipotent stem cells from a patient, quickly process them and then use them for treatment would be brilliant. There are many advantages; there is a good available source, it would be cheaper than IPScs, more ethical than ECs and potentially quicker to develop into treatments than other techniques.
I'd be worried if I couldn't contribute!
