A Major Regenerative Medicine Milestone

Laboratory-grown replacement organs have moved a step closer, as MRC Centre for Regenerative Medicine at the University of Edinburgh (United Kingdom) researchers report that they have grown a fully functional organ from transplanted laboratory-created cells in a living animal for the first time.  Clare Blackburn and colleagues have created a thymus – the organ that supplies the body with immune cells.   Specialized thymus cells were created in the lab from a completely different cell type using a technique called reprogramming.  The laboratory-created cells were transplanted onto a mouse kidney to form an organized and functional mini-thymus in a living animal. The study authors submit that they: “demonstrate that cellular reprogramming approaches can be used to generate an entire organ, and open the possibility of widespread use of thymus transplantation to boost immune function in patients.”