Top 3 Techniques for Creating Organs in the Lab

[Clark]

http://www.livescience.com/46971-techniques-creating-organs-lab.html

Top 3 Techniques for Creating Organs in the Lab
By Alyssa Danigelis

For people who need organ transplants, the agonizing wait could be shortened in the future, as doctors and medical researchers are now advancing techniques for creating new organs in the lab.

Medicine has not yet been able to reproduce the most complex organs such as the heart, liver and lung, said Doris Taylor, director of regenerative medicine research at the Texas Heart Institute in Houston. "But it's very, very exciting to see how far we've come in the last few years," she said.

Even the simplest organs require an underlying scaffold or framework, and recently researchers have found several ways to produce such structures, aiming to help with cases where a transplantable organ from a donor isn't readily available. These methods include bioprinting, reusing an organ cleaned of its cells and spinning one from nanofibers.

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