new bladder

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spuriousmonkey

Banned
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4871540.stm
US scientists have successfully implanted bladders grown in the laboratory from patients' own cells into people with bladder disease.
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Quite nice achievement. I wonder how they will manage with more complex organs?
 
lets not get too excited yet.
There are some issues with some of the patients involved in the trial that dropped out.

Also, what is this "biodegradeable" material that the scafolding is made out of?
I wonder what the long term effects of that material existing in the body for an extended period of time would be....
 
"Biodegradable" material, as in biodegradable sutures exist the body after a short period of time and then exist the body with no side effects. "Scafolding" - well, welcome to the world of nanotechnology.

This is an exciting achievement that goes to show that there are no bounds to replicating organs. The problem will be with complex organs such as the kidney where millions of minute glomeruli and nephron corpuscles would have to be mass regrown. This could foreseeably be accomplished via computerized mass micro-emplacement techniques of reproducing cells on nano-scafolding.
 
yeah, sometimes I wonder why we don't fund that sort of thing more. I believe we have the tech to do more complex organs, but haven't developed the methods.
 
valich said:
"Biodegradable" material, as in biodegradable sutures exist the body after a short period of time and then exist the body with no side effects. "Scafolding" - well, welcome to the world of nanotechnology.
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sutures are relatively small compared to the mass of the scaffolding they are talking about here.

Also, nano technology is, at best, a fledgling field.
And the article makes no mention of using nano-technology for this solution:
They took a sample of bladder tissue from each patient, and cultured the cells in a nutrient bath in the laboratory.

The cells were seeded on to a biodegradable bladder-shaped "scaffold" made out of collagen.

Elastic, smooth muscle cells were grown on the outside, with epithelial cells forming the bladder lining on the inside.

After two months the new bladders were fully grown. Each was stitched to the patient's existing bladder to create an enlarged, and more effective organ.

what makes you think nano-technology was involved?
 
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The nano-scafolding platform is a carbon-carbon substance that is now standardized material in these types of procedures and pose no risk: they are entirely disolved and serve only to hold the growing cells and then they dissolve inside the body. Get ahead of the game on this point.

What I am amazed at is that we have been able to use this type of scafolding platform to take a one millimeter silicon "neuro-chip," containing "16,000 electronic transistors and hundreds of capacitors," and fuse it with living neurons (neuro transmitters and receptors) inside the living brain cells of another mammal. In this case a rat (see: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12037941).

Aside from what the article says, can you realize the profound future implications of this? It's astounding.
 
The scafold in the bladder reconstruction was made from a mixture of collagen (sometimes we call it "fat") and polyglycolic acid. Polyglycolic acid is what we have been using to make biodegradeable sutures out of for decades, without incident. See above.

Also, carbon-carbon nano scafolding is now in experimental stages (successful experimental stages) for reconnecting severed nerve endings. This has shown to be successful in reconnecting nerve endings in the visual cortex of mice - they were blinded, now they can see. Also, we are now developing nano scafolding to produce artificial muscles.
 
Ah ha, yes right. So in other words you’re saying that nanotech had nothing to do with the in vitro grown bladder. :bugeye: You haven’t changed much in your brief absence, have you?

valich said:
....collagen (sometimes we call it "fat")....
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Who calls it 'fat'? Most of the rest of us know that collagen is a protein.
 
Sorry? I thought he argued that they used nanotech. Although I usually have troubles finding out (or rather do not want to waste the time trying to understand) what he wants to say in his copy/paste posts.
Other than that I'd also say that I'd also argue that an in vitro growth of the bladder is not nanotechnology per se. At least not in the usual context of nanotechnology. It would be different if they had built nanostructures, but merely making a polymer and letting cells grow on it does not qualify in my opinion.
 
valich said:
The scafold in the bladder reconstruction was made from a mixture of collagen (sometimes we call it "fat")
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ummmmm, collagen is a protein. :D (no lipids there)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collagen

valich said:
Also, carbon-carbon nano scafolding is now in experimental stages (successful experimental stages) for reconnecting severed nerve endings. This has shown to be successful in reconnecting nerve endings in the visual cortex of mice - they were blinded, now they can see. Also, we are now developing nano scafolding to produce artificial muscles.
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Thats all very fascinating. But what does that have to do with the growth of this bladder in this particular experiment?
:confused:
 
CharonZ said:
Other than that I'd also say that I'd also argue that an in vitro growth of the bladder is not nanotechnology per se. At least not in the usual context of nanotechnology. It would be different if they had built nanostructures, but merely making a polymer and letting cells grow on it does not qualify in my opinion.
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agreed.

When Im thinking of direct applications of nanotechnology, Im thinking of nano scale type manufacturing via manipulation of single atoms.....
 
Well, it does not need to be that small. Quite a large branch in the biophysics area are dealing with proteins as nanostructures. Of course usually not large polymers.
Manipulating atoms is something like a grail of nanotechnology in general, though.
 
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