器官移植短缺 实验室培育

The Red Cross Society of China has announced the country's first online volunteer organ-donor registry this month, amid a shortage of organs for transplant. But China is not the only country facing this difficulty; in the United States, chronic shortages have pushed scientists to tap into the body's own ability to regenerate itself.

Researchers at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina are trying to grow organs in a lab. Using a process called "decellularisation" on pig livers, the doctors strip the pig's cells off its liver but leave the underlying structure behind.

The hope is to seed the remaining structure with human liver cells to see if those cells will grow and multiply into a fully functioning human liver. PhD candidate Abritee Dhal at Wake Forest University explains their choice of test animal:

"Pigs, their size is closer to a human liver. So if we're able to decellularise and put human cells back in there, it could help with the shortage of organs."

The Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine is also trying to make kidneys with the use of a 3D printer. The "ink" that comes out of the printer is made of various cells and a gel-like material to help support them.

The ability to grow and implant complex organs like hearts, lungs, livers and kidneys in humans is still a long way off. But there has been some success so far in creating simpler, hollow body parts. For example, there are people living with custom-made, lab-grown blood vessels, windpipes and bladders in the US.

To engineer those, scientists can take cells from a patient's own bone marrow or a biopsy of the needed body part and grow those cells on a biodegradable, synthetic scaffold. The scaffold is produced by a 3D printer in the exact size and shape needed.

Director of the Institute Dr. Anthony Atala explains how the biodegradable scaffold works:

"Our preference is to use a patient's own cells, and the patient's own organ specific cells because those cells already know what to do. A windpipe cell already knows that it's a windpipe cell, and it's going to create a windpipe cell for that patient that will not be rejected or kicked out."

With luck, this may help end the waiting game for donor organs, which some patients unfortunately never receive.

For CRI, I'm Luo Laiming.