ONE GROWING NEW ORGANS ore than 120 000 people in the United States are waiting for a lifesaving organ transplant at any given time Yet in 2014 less than one quarter of these patients received transplants The gap between the number of patients who need an organ and the number of organs available to be transplanted continues to widen Meanwhile the costs are fatal Each day 22 people die while waiting for a transplant Organ shortages have increasingly become a public health crisis Even in cases in which a patient receives a transplant from a donor there is a still a strong chance their body will reject the organ To combat this many patients need to take drugs that suppress their immune system so it doesn't attack the organ for the rest of their lives Although these drugs known as immunosuppressants are vital for organ recipients they weaken the immune system which Until doctors are able to grow more leaves the body less resistant to infectious diseases types of organs in the lab artificial and cancer means such as heart pumps help some
Kidneys filter waste from the blood creating urine the bladder holds until it is released Growing Organs in the Lab But what if there were a way to engineer an organ using a patient s own cells This would eliminate the need for an organ donor and also help ensure the organ wouldn't be rejected Immunosuppressant drugs would be less necessary After all the body isn't likely to reject the patient's own cells It may sound like science fiction but there are patients today who are living healthy lives with The First Organ Transplant bladders urethras and vaginas that were grown inside a laboratory In 2001 a research team from Wake Forest University led by Dr Anthony Atala became the first group to successfully transplant lab grown human bladders into patients using the patients own cells Seven children from ages four to 19 who had poor bladder function received the transplants The first successful human organ transplant was performed in 1954 The patient 23 year old Richard Herrick had been experiencing kidney failure To save his brother Herrick's identical twin Ronald agreed to donate one of his own kidneys More than 30 years later the surgeon who performed the transplant Dr Joseph Murray received the prestigious Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work in order to expand the pool of donors beyond identical twins however researchers needed to find ways to prevent organ rejection Eventual they made another breakthrough the successful development of treatments to suppress the immune system which enabled t body to accept the new organ To create the bladders scientists took a small piece of the diseased bladder tissue roughly half the size of a postage stamp gently took apart the cells and grew the cells outside the body They then created a biodegradable scaffold or frame made of polyglycolic acid and collagen Polyglycolic acid is a man made material used to make some plastics and skin care products Collagen is a protein found in connective 6
