1st lab-grown oesophagus now implanted in mice

In a first, scientists say they have grown functional sections of oesophagus in the lab using stem cells and successfully transplanted them into mice. The advance, published in the journal Nature Communications, offers a potential path towards developing treatments for children with oesophageal defects.

The study by researchers at the Francis Crick Institute in the UK and colleagues is the first of its kind for a complex multi-layered organ, overcoming a major challenge of regenerative medicine: different early-stage cells need different conditions to develop into the right cell type.

“We were amazed to see that our engineered tissue had both the structure and function of a healthy oesophagus, and hooked up with nearby blood vessels within a week of transplantation – a promising step forward in our pursuit to create better treatments for patients with oesophageal defects,” said Paola Bonfanti from the Francis Crick Institute.

The team engineered pieces of oesophagus – about two centimetres in length – by injecting different stem cells into rat tissue scaffolds, in stages, under the optimum conditions for each cell type. First, they injected early-stage connective tissue and muscle cells from mice and humans into the scaffold, which formed muscle layers when the scaffold was made to mimic the movements of an oesophagus. Next, they injected mouse early-nerve cells, which formed neurons that innervated the muscle layers.

Finally, the researchers injected rat early-epithelial cells which formed a functional cell barrier lining the inside of the oesophagus.