Source: University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston
Date: June 24, 2010
Summary:
Tissue engineers' progress toward growing new lungs for transplantation or research has long been frustrated by the problem of coaxing stem cells to develop into the varied cell types that populate different locations in the lung Now, researchers from the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston have demonstrated a potentially revolutionary solution to this problem. As they describe in an article published electronically ahead of print by the journal Tissue Engineering Part A, they seeded mouse embryonic stem cells into "acellular" rat lungs — organs whose original cells had been destroyed by repeated cycles of freezing and thawing and exposure to detergent. The result: empty lung-shaped scaffolds of structural proteins on which the mouse stem cells thrived and differentiated into new cells appropriate to their specific locations.
