Transplants

Oh my god! I’ve just watched this video on TED(an amazing website, full of fascinating things) and I saw this clip. Everything on this website is mind boggling, but this particular video, and especially the bit about the printing of cells just blew my mind.  

We live in an aging population. This means that where we once had a large proportion of relatively young people in the population, with extending life expectancy, the majority is shifting to a relatively large proportion of old people. With this comes all of the associated health problems – reduced immune function, loss of control over your body or mind, or failing organs. And this is what astonished me. This company or institute has pioneered, over the space of twenty years, the alternatives to organ transplant. I don’t mean the patient wouldn’t receive an organ, only that there would be no donor. The procedure as I understood it is this:

They take a biopsy of your failed organ. They rip it apart until you have groupings of cells and then they cultivate those. They know how the organ fits together, so using a biodegradable mould, they cultivate layers of the tissue needed – i.e. on a bladder, the inside of the mould has one kind of cell type, the outside has muscle tissue. They pour the cultivated muscle cells onto the framework on the outside, and the other cells into the framework on the inside. It goes into a kind of incubator which mimics the body’s conditions, and hey presto you have a new bladder. This was phenomenal, and if it can be applied to patients change the face of medicine. Patient has bowel cancer? Make them a new one. Patient has kidney failure? Make them a new one. Immunosuppressant drugs? Who needs those? Because the tissue is cultivated from your own cells there is no rejection.

But what prompted me to immediately get on the internet and blog about this was the printer. They took an inkjet printer (you may even have something similar on your desk right now) and swapped the cartridges around. They cracked the method, or formula for making this work, and then printed a heart. So it didn’t beat until a few hours later but it still happened, and they printed a heart! I can’t properly convey how excited and astounded I am by this notion, but I’m desperately trying to (I’ll be on here in an hour’s time, correcting spelling mistakes), but the idea that you can just manufacture your own organs and have a new one is extraordinary. If we had this technology now, then it’s possible that at least 30,000 lives could have been saved in 2010 alone*. This technology is so new and exciting, and it reminds me of why I want to become a doctor. The science, the idea of using science to help people, and the constant improvement of current methods are all features of medicine which I find more interesting than any other profession and are why I want to be a doctor.

*I did a little bit of research and found that over 30,000 people died in 2010 from problems to do with the cardiac system alone. This piece of information requires that I counted all of the relevant causes of death correctly, so it may be wrong. The figures themselves came from the government site here.