Pioneering surgeons have moved a step closer to growing the human oesophagus in the laboratory, it was announced today.
Tissue engineering scientists based in the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden, have created oesophagi and used bone marrow stem cells to safely transplant the organs into rats, they report.
Once inside the animals, the new organs trigger regeneration of nerves, muscles, epithelial cells and blood vessels, say Professor Paolo Macchiarini and the team.
Reporting in Nature Communications, they explain that tissue engineering – growing human tissues and organs – has already been used to make bladder, trachea and blood vessels which have been successfully transplanted. But growing oesophageal tissue has been challenging.
The team created the organs using rat oesophagi stripped of their cells, leaving a scaffold that was "reseeded" with bone marrow cells, which have a low risk of graft rejection.
"Organ-specific characteristics" were observed after three weeks, and the tissues were used to replace segments of the oesophagus in rats. These rats all survived, and epithelium, muscle cells, blood vessels and nerves, were seen in the grafts after two weeks.
Dr Macchiarini says: "We believe that these very promising findings represent major advances towards the clinical translation of tissue engineered oesophagi."
He hopes that such tissue engineered organs could benefit the hundreds of thousands of patients diagnosed each year with oesophageal disorders such as cancer, congenital anomalies or trauma.
Currently, parts of a patient’s own intestine or stomach can be used as an oesophageal replacement, however the graft rarely works well. But a graft made by the new technique could be far superior at improving surgery-related mortality, illness and functional outcome, say the team.
Sjoqvist, S. et al. Experimental orthotopic transplantation of a tissue-engineered oesophagus in rats. Nature Communications 15 April 2014 doi:10.1038/ncomms4562
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