Scientists 'grow' bones in lab

Scientists and researchers are a step closer to being able to grow bones and organs in the lab. Photo / 123RF

The ability to grow bones and organs in the lab for transplants has moved a step closer following a major breakthrough.

It paves the way for doctors to be able to replace complex structures such as hips and knee joints damaged by arthritis and tissue damaged in car crashes or battle.

Although a 3in lab-grown windpipe was successfully transplanted in 2011, bigger cartilage structures have proved problematic because of the difficulties in supplying enough oxygen to the tissue being grown.

But researchers at Bristol and Liverpool universities have overcome this obstacle.

In the body, the blood supplies oxygen to cells, but in the lab they get it from the solution they are grown in. However, dense pieces of cartilage cannot get the oxygen they need, and the cells die. So researchers created stem cells with a built-in oxygen reservoir - the protein myoglobin.

Dr Adam Perriman, of Bristol's School of Cellular and Molecular Medicine, said: "It's like supplying each cell with its own scuba tank which it can breathe from."

Body parts grown from a patient's cells are preferable to donor tissue because the recipient does not need drugs to stop the immune system attacking "foreign" tissue.

Writing in the journal Nature Communications, Professor Anthony Hollander, of the University of Liverpool, said: "We have overcome one of the major hurdles."

- Daily Mail