Because kidneys are one of the earliest organs to grow and the organs that are most frequently transplanted in human medicine, the researchers from the Guangzhou Institutes of Biomedicine and Health decided to focus their attention on studying them. Their objective is to accomplish the growth of human kidneys using human cells inside pig embryos. This is a different strategy compared to the recent high-profile achievements that have been made in the United States, where genetically engineered pig kidneys, as well as a heart, have been successfully implanted into human patients.
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New Organs With the Help of Pigs
Scientists in China have achieved a world first by successfully growing kidneys, including human cells in pig embryos. This achievement, which might one day assist in alleviating shortages in organ donations, was just announced. The fact that pig cells are more robust than human cells has proven to be a significant obstacle in the process of developing such hybrids. The kidneys of the five embryos that were chosen for further investigation were found to be developing normally for their stage of development, and the ureters that would ultimately link them to the bladder were beginning to grow in all of them, as can be seen in the image that follows:
We found that if you create a niche in the pig embryo, then the human cells naturally go into these spaces; […] We saw only very few human neural cells in the brain and spinal cord and no human cells in the genital ridge, explained Zhen Dai, the study co-author.
That’s genuinely fascinating yet a bit puzzling!
According to the specialists, the discovery raises ethical concerns due to the fact that there were also human cells discovered in the brains of the pigs. One of the researchers emphasized that there would be numerous obstacles to overcome in order to transform the study into a workable solution; yet, despite these hurdles, it is clear that this intriguing approach merits more investigation.
Read more about the recent scientific breakthrough in the journal Cell Stem Cell.
