Functional Lab-Grown Kidneys

The article: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=lab-grown-kidneys-transplanted-into-rats-and-become-functional

The original study (Nature Medicine): http://www.nature.com/nm/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nm.3154.html

At a hospital in Boston, scientists have created a rat kidney that will function properly upon being transplanted. The team started with the kidneys of deceased rats, removing nonfunctional cells until there was only a skeleton left. Then, they added a combination of human and rat cells to rebuild the organ. This team is the first to be able to do anything like this, and shows an amazing breakthrough in the bioengineering community. It still has a long way to go, being at most 30% as effective as a regular kidney, but this is still two times better than the kidneys used by patients before they switch to dialysis. Given a decade or two, this could end up a very real possibility. That said, this technique has been in practice since 2008, so we could be waiting quite awhile before it ends up a viable alternative.

Nature of Science Themes:

3.) The researchers themselves are very tentative towards their findings, and sound very conservative in their estimates of when their technique could become useful abroad.

8.) So far, this research team is the only one to have successfully done anything similar to this, though they have applied this technique to other organs. They only talk about the future results of this experiment in terms of if other teams manage to repeat their technique successfully.

-Sebastian Wolf