Growing Body Organs

Custom-Made Organs To Go

Never wait for a donor again—grow your own body parts instead

The Prescription: Tissue engineer Anthony Atala of Wake Forest University Medical Center and his team made headlines in April when they announced the first custom-built human bladders to be successfully transplanted into people. A month later, they reported that they had used the same tissue-engineering technique to restore sexual function to rabbits with damaged penises, opening the door for radical new treatments for men with sexual dysfunction. Their next big challenge is to grow one of the most intricate organs in the human body: the kidney. Atala’s work on the bladder took off in 1999, when he harvested the cells of the first of seven patients suffering from bladder disease. He and his colleagues grew the cells in culture, implanted them in a biodegradable, bladder-shaped structure, and then grafted their creation onto the patient’s unhealthy organ. This spring, they wrote in a top medical journal that all the bladder recipients are healthy, marking a major milestone in tissue engineering.
When?: 2016. The group has already produced a section of kidney tissue that excretes a urine-like substance. The next big step is to grow the millions of nephrons, or urine-recycling ducts, necessary for a functional kidney.