Grow Your Own Body Parts!
Photo by dee_gee
A while back I made a post about trying to grow new fingers. The article below talks about a woman that needed a trachea transplant. Doctors harvested a trachea from a cadaver and removed all DNA-containing material, just leaving a lattice structure. They then took some of the woman’s own adult stem cells and put them on the lattice. After several months the stem cells had produced a complete trachea and it was successfully transplanted into the recipient.
Tissue-Engineered Trachea Transplant Is Adult Stem Cell Breakthrough
A similar technique was used to grow heart cells in rat to replace tissue damaged as a result of a heart attack. Here’s the article: http://cmbi.bjmu.edu.cn/news/0309/135.htm
