Humanised Organs Can Be Grown In Animals
Ever since stem cell research has been discovered there have been many controversial arguments discussing whether or not this method is okay to use when dealing with patients. Research on stem cells is advancing knowledge about how an organism develops from a single cell and how healthy cells replace damaged cells in adult organisms. Since it was discovered, stem cell research is coming a very long way, even though these processes probably won’t be experimented in humans years for decades. Right now in stem cell research we are extracting stem cells from humans bone marrow and inserting them into animal fetus's before the immune system can learn the difference between it's own cells and foreign cells. The plan is to grow more human stem cells in animal organs than animal cells so we can perform organ transplants to replace damaged organs with the animal's organs. The only problem about this, is a rejection of the animal portion of cells in the human body. This means that the cells in our body could attack this new organ.
Although, this therapy is still years away, the beginning processes have been started by a team led by Esmail Zanjani at the University of Nevada. Zanjani’s team hopes that the animal-human organs they are working on will have compatible new cells that are exactly the same as a patient’s organs for fixing damaged organs. With the new research they have found, it could be possible that they replace whole organs. The only problem about animal-human organs is that people could get viruses from animals that humans don’t normally acquire
The original plan of Zanjani’s was to see prevent birth defects in unborn babies by injecting healthy stem cells into the fetus but in the process of doing this, he found that in doing this process, it could also be used to grow “humanized” organs. This idea came from the work of Flake. He found that the human cells develop into part of the heart, skin, muscle, fat, and other tissues when stem cells are taken out of bone marrow and injected into sheep fetuses.
Stem cells have two important characteristics that distinguish them from other types of cells. First, they are unspecialized cells that renew themselves for long periods through cell division. The second is that under certain physiologic or experimental conditions, they can be induced to become cells with special functions such as the beating cells of the heart muscle or the insulin-producing cells of the pancreas.