Researchers used chemicals to strip a rat kidney of its original cells, leaving behind a collagen scaffold. Then they bathed the structure in stem cells and neonatal kidney cells. The cells grafted onto the scaffold and grew new kidney tissue that functioned like the original—though less efficiently—to filter waste and produce urine when transplanted into a rat. In theory, the technique could one day be used to create customized livers and hearts. “If this technology can be scaled to human-size grafts, patients suffering from renal failure who are currently waiting for donor kidneys could theoretically receive an organ grown on demand,” Harald Ott, head of the Massachusetts General Hospital team that grew the rat kidney, tells New Scientist. “It would solve the donor organ shortage.” In the U.S., just 18,000 of the 100,000 people waiting for a kidney receive one in any given year. An organ generated from a patient’s own cells would not be rejected by the immune system—a problem that causes almost half of transplanted kidneys to eventually fail.
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