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| courtesy: panorama.com |
The brave
new frontier of Organ Printing will not be a Sci-Fi fiction but will soon be a
reality for Medical field. Every year about 120,000 organs are transplanted
from human donor to recipient, including donor and cadaver transplant.
But, there
is always organ shortage as evident by long waiting list for transplant and
many times people die because of unavailability of suitable match.
Imagine what
it would be like to give command ‘Print’ and the organ will be ready. As yet, such
bioprinting is still in experimental stage, currently bio-printed tissue is
only used for drug testing but researchers are hopeful that it will be available
for transplant in few years.
Researchers
have implanted printed muscles, bones and ears in animals and were successful
in integrating them flawlessly with the recipient.
Taking a
leap forward in this direction researchers at Northwestern University FeinbergSchool of Medicine and McCormick School of Engineering have bioprinted ovaries
that are functioning normally.
They removed
a mouse ovary and replacing it with a bioprosthetic ovary, the mouse was not only
able to ovulate but also give birth to healthy pups and nurse them.
The paper
was published on May 16, in Nature Communications.
Teresa K.
Woodruff, a reproductive scientist and director of the Women’s Health Research
Institute at Feinberg said, “This research shows these bioprosthetic ovaries have
long-term, durable function, using bioengineering, instead of transplanting
from a cadaver, to create organ structures that function and restore the health
of that tissue for that person, is the holy grail of bioengineering for
regenerative medicine.”
This will
have huge impact on humans, to restore fertility and hormone production in
women who have undergone adult cancer treatments or those who survived
childhood cancer and now have increased risks of infertility and hormone-based
developmental issues.
The Full-text of the article in Nature Communications can be accessed here.
3-D printed
ovaries produce healthy offspring
