The Courier & Advertiser (Perth and Perthshire Edition)
Stem-cell-grown ‘mini organs’may give hope for child transplants
“Mini organs” grown using stem cells from a patient’s tissue could offer hope for children with intestinal failure, a study suggests.
Scientists at the Francis Crick Institute, Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) and UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health (ICH) have grown human intestinal grafts using stem cells from patient tissue.
The team hope the findings could one day lead to personalised transplants for children with intestinal failure.
Dr Vivian Li, senior author and group leader of the Stem Cell and Cancer Biology Laboratory at the Crick, said: “It’s urgent that we find new ways to care for children without a working intestine because, as they grow older, complications from parental nutrition can arise.
“We’ve set out a process to grow one layer of intestine in the laboratory, moving us a step closer to being able to offer these patients a form of regenerative medicine, which uses materials created from their own tissue.”
The researchers took small biopsies of intestine from 12 children who either had intestinal failure or were at risk of developing the condition.
In the lab they then stimulated the biopsy cells to grow into “mini- guts”, also known as intestinal organoids, generating more than 10 million intestinal stem cells from each patient over the course of four weeks.
The researchers also collected small intestine and colon tissue that would have been discarded from other children undergoing essential surgery to remove parts of their gut.
Using laboratory techniques cells were removed from these tissues leaving behind a skeleton structure which formed scaffolds.
The researchers placed the “mini-guts” on to these scaffolds where they grew on this structure to form a living graft.
Due to specific culture conditions, the stem cells changed into many of the different types of cells that exist in the small intestine and the grafts were able to digest and absorb peptides, the building blocks of proteins, as well as digest sucrose into glucose sugars.