Ghost Organs, Stem Cells, and Frankensteins Transplant Technology

Ghost Organs, Stem Cells, and Frankensteins Transplant Technology

If youre a biotech investor, youre undoubtedly aware of the buzz regarding 3D bioprinting. There have been scores of articles and video presentations in popular outlets heralding the end to transplant organ shortages.

Using living cells rather than inanimate construction materials, 3D printing technologies have been used to build models of organs and other tissues. Excitement about the possibility of mass-produced bioprinted transplant organs has fueled a massive inpouring of capital into companies working on this seemingly science fiction technology.

Im not writing today to tell you that bioprinting will never succeed in producing viable transplant organs, though the technology has a long way to go with many problems to solve in its path. Ive lived long enough to know that underestimating future scientific progress is a pastime popular among fools and stock shorters. On the contrary, Im writing to tell you an even older biotechnology is much, much nearer the target of lab-grown transplant organs.

A few weeks ago, John Mauldin and I visited the Minnesota labs of a company that is pursuing the same goal of transplant organs. During that visit, we held ghost organs, as they are sometimes called, in our hands. In these pictures, John is holding a completely decellularized pig heart. Whats left is the white extracellular matrix, the scaffolding upon which living cells attached.

We also talked at length to the scientists who believe this new biotechnology will solve the primary problem facing 3D bioprinting. Essentially, that problem is that the myriad processes involved in new organ growth are impossible to duplicate in todays bioprinters.

Our bodies, including our organs, all began as undifferentiated embryonic stem cells. Each embryonic stem cell contains the totality of the genome that will eventually grow into a fully functional human or other animal. Moreover, these cells are immortal, meaning they dont age until they have differentiated into one of the many adult forms of cells that make up our impossibly complex bodies.

Nothing is more awe-inspiring than that process of transformation from a single zygote to a complete organism with about 37.2 trillion cells. At this point, its impossible to say exactly how many different cell types exist in our body, but the number is enormous.

Somehow, however, a few undifferentiated stem cells, starting with a single zygote, transform into a complete human being with a full range of organs that function precisely down to the level of individual molecules. The powers inherent in embryonic stem cells also exist, by the way, in certain induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells.

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Ghost Organs, Stem Cells, and Frankensteins Transplant Technology