The Bionic Body

The Bionic Body

This article is about people discovering ways to grow human tissues. Fifeteen years ago Bob Langer and colleague Joseph Vacanti discovered a new process of growing human tissues. However they couldn't work on publishing their work. Now they are considers the "Father's of the Feild of tissue engineering." Langer, Vaconti and Charles (brother of Langer) and researchers around the world pursue the day when replacement tissues and organs are availible and custom made for those who need them. This study will eventually lead to lab grown cartilage, blood vessels, cardiac valves and muscle tissue. Which means custom made hearts, livers, breasts, corneas, kidneys, bone marrow and bladders. The first step to this happening is unlocking the biochemical signals that influence growth and development and paying special attention to the physical environment. How would all this happen? It is called scaffold. Scaffold is biodegradable materials, which cells can be seeded on. Cells are seeded two to three millimeters apart. Then it is bathed in nutritive media. After that scaffolding can be molded in to any shape or size. Once they get it just right it will be able to get implanted to organs and the body will react to it and start growing new tissues.
Dr. Gail Naughton, president of Advanced Tissue Sciences Inc. patented a container called bioreactor. That container stimulates conditions inside a healthy body. That causes physical stress on cells and then tissues naturally become more strong.
NASA has also found an important lesson by cultivating cells in weightless space.tissues that form like sheets grow better under forces and cells that are destined to be three dimmensional structure performs better in micro gravity.
All these are fantastic discoveries especially since in December 2000, 74,000 Americans were waiting on an organ. I believe that number has increased and will continue to increase. And if some how one day organs are custom made the number will decrease. As a result it would make it better world. I hope it does happen one day.

Body Regions