-Caveat Lector- >From The Red Herring, http://www.redherring.com/insider/2000/1214/tech-mag-89-labrat121400.html Lab Rat: Designer hearts By Niall McKay Redherring.com, December 14, 2000 This article appears in the January 15, 2001, issue of Red Herring Magazine. If Peter Johnson gets his way, scientists will be able to design a human heart, liver, or pair of lungs in much the same way engineers design a car -- using computer-aided design. The former plastic surgeon and founder of Pittsburgh-based TissueInformatics is building a database that he says will provide the pharmaceutical and medical industries with "blueprints" for various types of human tissue. In compiling a comprehensive data bank of tissue samples, the company is trying to do for our understanding of tissue what the Human Genome Project is doing for genetics. TissueInformatics is part of the relatively new field of tissue engineering. The basic idea is this: take a cell, put it in the correct culture, and grow more cells or tissue until the structure is complete. This shouldn't be confused with cloning, a far more controversial technology that aims to create whole organisms. The goal of tissue engineers is simpler: produce a specific tissue or organ -- a bone, for example, or a kidney. A QUANTUM LEAP Successful tissue engineering could transform medical treatment. Many more transplants could take place if surgeons no longer had to rely on donated organs. More than $400 billion, roughly half the annual health care costs in the United States, goes toward treatments that could be altered by tissue engineering. In addition to transplants, these include blood transfusion, vascular surgery, heart bypass, bone marrow treatment, and plastic surgery. Scientists, however, are years away from being able to engineer a vascular human organ, one with a complex network of blood vessels, like a heart or liver. Currently, only non-vascular tissue, like skin and bone cartilage, can be made in a lab. "That's a hell of a start," says Thomas Krummel, professor and chairman of the Stanford School of Medicine Department of Surgery. "But the bad news is that the next step [to grow vascular tissue] will be a quantum leap." According to the market research firm Frost & Sullivan, revenue from tissue engineering was $77 million in 1999, an increase of 40 percent over that in 1998. Massachusetts-based Organogenesis received U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval in May 1998 for a skin-replacement product, Apilgraf, to treat leg ulcers. It's seeking FDA approval to use the product for burn victims. Annual sales exceed $1.3 million. Growing organs like hearts and livers is far more complicated than growing skin. Their structure is complex, so it's difficult to manufacture the correct shape. It's also difficult to duplicate, in a lab, the body's elegant mechanisms for getting oxygen into cells and getting carbon dioxide out -- a process vital to keeping the organ alive. Organogenesis is developing a method to grow liver tissue, but the company doesn't expect to have a product for at least five to seven years. "We're at the stage where we can build an adobe, but what we need to be able to do is build skyscrapers," says Dr. Johnson. BODY SCULPTING One solution, being developed by California-based Advanced Tissue Sciences (Nasdaq: ATIS), is to build biodegradable scaffolding. This would be used to support the shape of a tissue under construction, much the same way that a scaffold is used in the building trades. Once the organ was mature, the scaffold would disintegrate. But to design the scaffold for an organ, scientists must figure out the precise location of each blood vessel, cell, and protein matrix. That's where TissueInformatics comes in. The company opened in 1997 and has raised more than $2 million from investors like Motorola (NYSE: MOT). Using a magnetic resonance spectrometer, it plans to produce electronic images of the molecular structures of tissues, including the location of cells and blood vessels. So far, TissueInformatics has imaged only skin tissue. But as the company amasses more images of other types of tissue, scientists will be able to use those images as blueprints for designing fresh tissue. This could prove invaluable for researchers analyzing the roots of human illness. "By combining a tissue database with the human genome database and mining the data, scientists could, in theory, find the source of the problem without leaving their desks," says Dr. Johnson. Critics of genetic engineering would have us believe that tampering with the genome may pollute the human gene pool. Should that ever occur, TissueInformatics and companies like it might possess the only blueprint of the original structure and layout of tissue, the basic fiber of human life. Scary thought. Write to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To receive this column over email, sign up for Lab Rat here. <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance�not soap-boxing�please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'�with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds�is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. 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