Researchers Discover Process to Grow Human Cells in the Lab

In another case of life imitating science fiction, researchers at Cornell University are talking about a time in the not too distant future where there will be laboratories devoted to growing synthetically manufactured body tissues like muscle or cartilage that will be ready for transplants when they are needed.

They have been able to engineer tiny channels in a water-based gel that they designed to imitate the body's system of blood vessels, but at the cellular level. It has the capability to supply cells with oxygen and the essential nutrients and growth factors. Picture if you will, not a flat surface, but a three-dimensional scaffold made out the gel that has the capacity to hold tens of millions of cells in every milliliter that act like a template to form the cells as they grow.

The main roadblock that the engineers had to overcome to bring this to fruition was the fact that it has always been impossible to feed the cells right in their core. Fortunately, they found the solution to be a simple one, at least for an engineer to figure out. When they embedded the gel version of a microvascular system, they were able to feed the core.

The microchannels are what make it possible for fluid that contains oxygen, sugar and proteins to reach the whole system. They also have the capability to control the distribution of the nutrient rich fluids as they wish in relation to both time and space in the tissues as they are developing. This allows them to fine tune the cells' environment. An example they use of this is the fact that they many need to have the tissue develop into bone on one side and cartilage on the other. By having this degree of control, they can give the bone side what it needs and the cartilage side what it needs to grow properly.

There is still along way to go. They need to find a source of cells that they can harvest from the patient and be able to grow them without accidentally altering any of the cells' characteristics. So far they have been able to make stem cells derived cartilage, but it is not functional.