New tool dor scientists: tiny lab-erown oreans
‘Thini Lut’ oiers Clues to how Diseases work
UTRECHT, Netherlands — Els van der Heijden, who has cystic fibrosis, was finding it harder to breathe as her lungs filled with thick, sticky mucus. Despite taking more than a dozen pills and inhalers a day, the 53-year-old had to stop working and scale back doing the thing she loved best, horseback riding.
Doctors saw no sense in trying an expensive new drug because it hasn’t been proven to work in people with the rare type of cystic fibrosis that van der Heijden had.
Instead, they scraped a few cells from van der Heijden and used them to grow a mini version of her large intestine in a petri dish. When van der Heijden’s “mini gut” responded to treatment, doctors knew it would help her .
“I really felt, physically, like a different person,” van der Heijden said.
This experiment to help people with rare forms of cystic fibrosis in the Netherlands aims to grow mini intestines for every Dutch patient with the disease. It’s an early application of a technique now being worked on in labs all over the world, as researchers learn to grow organs outside of the body for treatment — and maybe someday for transplants.
So far, doctors have grown mini guts — just the size of a pencil point — for 450 of the Netherlands’ roughly 1,500 cystic fibrosis patients.
“The mini guts are small, but they are complete,” said Dr. Hans Clevers of the Hubrecht Institute, who pioneered the technique. Except for muscles and blood vessels, the tiny organs “have everything you would expect to see in a real gut, only on a really small scale.”
These so-called organoids mimic features of full-size organs, but don’t function the same way. Although many of the replicas are closer to undeveloped organs found in an embryo than adult ones, they are helping scientists unravel how organs mature and providing clues on how certain diseases might be treated.
In Australia, mini kidneys are being grown that could be used to test drugs. Researchers in the U.S. are experimenting with bits of livers that might be used to boost failing organs. At Cambridge University in England, scientists have created mini brains to study how neurons form and to understand disorders like autism.
Other experiments are underway in the Netherlands and the U.S. to test whether organoids might help pinpoint treatments for cancers involving the lungs, ovaries and pancreas.