Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Plants eyed as substitute for tissue
JONESBORO — To most who look inside the refrigerator in a third-floor lab of the Arkansas Biosciences Institute on the Arkansas State University campus, the plastic containers of spinach and other leafy vegetables that line the shelves look like lab workers’ lunches.
But to Fabricio Medina-Bolivar, a professor of metabolic engineering at ASU, they look like the future of health care.
Medina-Bolivar and a team of researchers with the Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, Mass., and the University of Wisconsin at Madison are
working together to create vascular networks for heart patients out of leaves and roots.
“The vascular system of the heart is similar to plants,” said Medina-Bolivar, who started at ASU in 2005. “We began talking and said, ‘Let’s see what nature is doing.’”
Representatives from the three universities began brainstorming in 2014 and met at the Arkansas Biosciences Institute in Jonesboro in early 2015.
They liked what they saw, Medina-Bolivar said.
“They were doing stem cell research at the University of Wisconsin,” he said. “We wondered if we could really use plant cells for human tissues. We used the same approach with plants.”
The team focuses primarily on spinach leaves as the “scaffolds” in which to transplant human cells. The group has already created a replica heart on a spinach leaf by transplanting human heart cells into the plant. A video that the team recently released shows a tiny network of veins leading to the beating “heart.”
Researchers flowed fluids and “microbeads” similar in size to human blood cells through the spinach’s created vascular system. They also seeded the spinach veins with human cells that line blood vessels.
They also have removed cells from parsley, sweet wormwood and hairy roots of peanuts.
Medina-Bolivar said the growth of human cells in plants also can be used for developing heart muscle, and vascular columns of wood may be useful in bone engineering.
“We have a lot of work to do, but so far this is very promising,” Glenn Gaudette, a professor of biomedical engineering at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, said in a news release about the process. “Adopting abundant plants that farmers have been cultivating for thousands of years for use in tissue engineering could solve a host of problems limiting the field.”
Joshua Gershlak, a student of Gaudette’s, said in the news release the stem of a spinach leaf reminded him of an aorta.
“So I thought, ‘Let’s perfuse right through the stem,’” he said. “We weren’t sure it would work, but it turned out to be pretty easy and replicable.”
It may sound like the fodder of science-fiction films in which scientists try to create humans out of plants, but it’s working.
“This is incredible,” Medina-Bolivar said. “Something like this sounds crazy. This opens the possibility of doing things people never thought of before.”
As a youngster growing up in Peru, Medina-Bolivar was curious about how plants were often used for medical remedies when pharmaceutical medicines were not available.
“There was always a plant to be used for something,” he said.
He earned a bachelor’s degree in biology in Lima, Peru, in 1982, and later a doctorate in plant physiology at Pennsylvania State University.
The research group will meet again next Monday to discuss its next step. The researchers also are seeking millions in grant money, Medina-Bolivar said. They will look at other plants to determine whether they can be used to grow human tissue, he said, but they are still years away from testing in humans.
“This is a whole new venue,” he said. “We can repair damaged hearts with plants. This is amazing.”