According to Donate Life NY, “more than 114,000 people are waiting for organ transplants in the United States, and of these, more than 92,000 await kidneys, more than 16,000 need livers; and more than 3,000 need hearts”. Moreover, “in 2011, a total of 6,669 patients died while waiting for organ transplants, and on average 18 people died each day because of the shortage of donated organs”. Now wouldn’t it be awesome if there were a way to fulfill this demand for organ transplants so that the amount of deaths per year could decrease?
Well, Surgeon Anthony Atala has been in the process of discovering a cure. According to TED, “ Dr. Anthony Atala is the director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, where his work focuses on growing and regenerating tissues and organs. His team engineered the first lab-grown organ to be implanted into a human – a bladder – and is developing experimental fabrication technology that can “print” human tissue on demand”.
In a 2011 TEDTalk, Dr. Atala spoke about the field of regenerative medicine, which consists of specific materials and cells you could implant in patients to help them regenerate. During the TEDTalk, Dr. Atala also walked his audience through the first use of a natural biomaterial in a human for tissue regeneration, which occurred in 1996 and helped replace and repair that patient’s organ structure. The biomaterial in the human acted as a bridge so that the cells in the organ could walk on that bridge and repair the gap, and regenerate that tissue.
Dr. Atala also spoke about how him and his team could “take a very small portion of the tissue of a deceased or injured organ, tease the cells apart, grow the cells outside of the body, take a scaffold, shape that material, and use those cells to coat that material one layer at a time; they then would place it into an oven like device, create that structure and bring it out”. In the presentation he showed the audience an engineered heart valve, human bladder, and liver, which had the same shape and movement of that body organ.
Moreover, Dr. Atala and his team used a CT Scan to go layer by layer using computerized 3D reconstruction to get right down to the internal organs and take the information and scan it in a computerized form to go layer by layer in that organ, allowing the printer to design the new organ for that patient.
An example of this occurred about 11 years ago, when Dr. Atala had a 10-year-old patient named Luke Massella receive an engineered bladder that was made up of his own cells; 11 years later Luke has been well ever since. According to Luke, the surgery prevented him from living the rest of his life of dialysis, and it allowed him to “…become captain of the wrestling team…and be a normal kid with his friends”. Seeing how well Dr. Atala’s experiment worked on Luke is amazing because this advance in medicine is truly a way of the future.
Below is Anthony Atala's 2011 TEDTalk: