[Wild Fragaria]

Don't you think this is pretty cool?   We are building 'ourselves'   

Nature News  Published online: 4 April 2006; | doi:10.1038/news060403-3

Scientists grow bladder replacement in lab

A team of scientists has grown human bladder sacs in the laboratory and successfully transplanted them into people.

It is the first time that a complicated internal organ, rather than a scrap of skin or other tissue, has been grown in the lab and placed into people. The researchers say that they are already working on growing tailor-made kidneys, livers or hearts that might bypass the shortage of donor organs and problems with organ rejection.

Anthony Atala at Wake Forest University School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and his colleagues took cells from the malfunctioning bladders of seven children with spina bifida and used them to grow thin sacs of tissue. They grafted the artificial organs, which look a little like hollowed-out grapefruits, on to the patients' own bladders. The team started their work in 1999 and then tracked the progress of the patients for several years before publishing the results in The Lancet1.

In the three patients who received the most promising version of the technique, the bladders worked better and leaked less than the current best treatment, in which a poor bladder is patched up with tissue cut from the bowel.

"This will definitely generate a lot of excitement for all tissue engineers," says Steve Chung who studies stem cells for bladder repair at the Advanced Urology Institute of Illinois in Spring Valley.

Growing a new body part is not easy. Medical researchers must first find a source of cells and coax them into multiplying in the lab. Next, they have to mould the cells into a structure that mimics the normal organ, often by growing them on a scaffold. They also have to ensure that the organ is properly nourished by blood vessels and nerves.

Atala's team did this by slicing a postage-stamp-sized fragment of bladder tissue from each patient and encouraging the cells to proliferate. They spread a layer of muscle cells on the outside of a bladder-shaped, biodegradable mould of synthetic polymer and collagen, and added a separate layer of bladder urothelial cells on the inside.

The organ part grew in a soup of nutrients for several weeks before the team sewed it to the patient's bladder.

Researchers already use artificially grown skin tissue in surgery, and scientists are working to create patches or full replacements for virtually every other organ in the body. This latest work is a significant step forwards because "they were actually able to do this in humans and show an enhanced function," says David Mooney, an expert in tissue engineering at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. But experts caution that the bladder is a relatively simple organ when compared to something like the heart.

Atala says that the team now wants to refine the technique so that they can offer it to patients with numerous bladder diseases and problems. Urologists would particularly like to adopt it for patients with bladder cancer, Chung says. But it could be difficult to grow a new bladder from a sick patient's own cells, because these might also be predisposed to cancer.

One way around this is to take stem cells from another part of the body, such as the bone marrow, and persuade these to generate bladder tissue, but such research is less advanced than Atala's.

[aldo_14]

Ach, nobody noticed my amusingly titled thread on the same subject.  Still, very interesting stuff.  Rather brilliant, too.

I thought this was thought to be one of the major potential applications for stem cells?

Love some of the ads, too

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[Wild Fragaria]

Wops, my bad     I will make it up to you and the rest by giving you some video game related article   I like your ads about the bladder though   

Nature News  Published online: 31 March 2006; | doi:10.1038/news060327-17

Chemistry: the video game

You are deep underground in a lab that once housed some of the finest minds in chemistry. But robots directed by a crackbrained artificial intelligence have taken it over and plan to use its equipment to destroy the world! After freezing an evil robot with your handy wrist-mounted hot-and-cold gun, you reach the Haber-Bosch room. And now you must correctly synthesize ammonia or die.

"Your students are playing video games," Gabriela Weaver told a group of chemistry teachers at the American Chemical Society meeting in Atlanta, Georgia, on 29 March. "They are playing them more and more hours a day. They are probably playing them in your class."

If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. Weaver, an associate professor of chemistry at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, is building a computer game about the subject - she hopes her prototype will be as appealing to students as the blockbuster games coming out of companies like Electronic Arts (EA).

Naturally, her grant money is a mere fraction of what games like The Sims or Myst cost to develop. But she's hoping to work something up to a level where she might can attract companies with plenty of cash.

Weaver has recruited undergraduate and graduate students in chemistry and computer science to help her shape the game. She set just a few rules. "There will be shooting, but there will not be death or blood." Hence the hot-and-cold gun, useful for on-the-go reactions and incapacitating enemy robots. "I don't know technically how a cold gun would work," admits Weaver.

So far they have a video that shows what Critical Mass will eventually look like (http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~kmartine/). So far it's a lot of shooting with some chemistry missions mixed in.

Educational video games have not yet gone big, despite a fair amount of enthusiasm among educators, at least among those who do not see video games as inherently stultifying. Part of the problem is that the industry, which is dominated by players such as EA, has not figured out how to make money off them.

"They basically have a few ideas that they keep repackaging and retooling," says Eric Klopfer, co-director of Education Arcade, a game project run by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

But that strategy doesn't work for educational games, he says. "You have to have the science and the content tightly woven together." And that makes it hard to copycat successful game strategies from one subject area to another.

Games are now being developed by projects like Education Arcade that teach electromagnetics, history and immunology. Klopfer says one model that might work is to have institutions such as universities take the initial financial risk, and then hand likely looking games to smaller video-game publishers.

The details of how games can be integrated into curricula are still being worked out. Some have talked about shorter games that fit the length of a class.

Others have pitched the idea of video games as homework - a proposal unlikely to elicit too much protest from students unless, of course, the games are perceived as very uncool. And therein lies the challenge of playing on student turf.

[karajorma]

Well I learnt more history playing Medieval and Rome : Total War than I ever learnt in history class so why not.

To be honest a strategy game based on these ideas would probably work better though. Unfortunately the kids who play strategy games are likely to know the Haber Cycle anyway

[Grug]

she hopes her prototype will be as appealing to students as the blockbuster games coming out of companies like Electronic Arts (EA).

Destined to fail already?