“Scientists have used stem cells to make bioengineered oesophagi that they successfully implanted into pigs, restoring the animals’ ability to swallow and eat. Similar lab-grown structures could be used to treat people with cancer and other conditions affecting the muscular tube that connects the throat to the stomach, researchers say.
Paolo De Coppi, a paediatric surgeon and researcher at University College London, says his team has been investigating minimally invasive ways to treat children born with a large hole in their oesophagus, a condition called long-gap oesophageal atresia. The current treatment is to move the child’s stomach up to their neck and join it directly to the back of their throat, or to transplant part of their colon to bridge the gap.
De Coppi and his colleagues have previously grown mouse cells on a rat oesophagus and implanted them into mice. They have also transplanted the pig-based scaffold into rabbits. The team’s latest work, published in Nature Biotechnology today, involved transplanting sections of oesophagus that had been grown in the lab into pigs, which are better than rodents as a model for humans, because of their size and physiology.”
From Nature.