Researchers Successfully Transplanted a Bio-Engineered Kidney in Rat

The researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, United States on 14 April 2013 announced that they had bio-engineered a kidney that can be marked a step-ahead in the quest to help patients suffering from Kidney Failure. The researchers as an experiment transplanted the bio-engineered kidney into rats and discovered that the experiment was successful.

The success of the experiment has laid a way for building replacement structures of lungs, livers and hearts. The process of kidney transplant into the rat involved taking out a rat kidney and stripping out its living cells by using a solution made of detergent and leave behind a shell made of collagen. Further, the rats’ empty structure with living cells was repopulated that comprised human endothelial cells that lined the walls of kidney blood vessels and kidney cells taken from newborn rat.

Then the cells were seeded in the correct part of the kidney with the help of a muscle duct that is called ureter as a tube and then transplanted the organ into the living rat from which the kidney was removed. The result of the experiment was that the new kidney started filtering the blood and produced urine as soon as the blood supply was restored.

The results of the experiment had brought human being a step-closer to create lab grown organs for humans. The team of researchers was led by Harald Ott.