Scientists have successfully grown an artificial human ear in a laboratory from tissues belonging to cows and sheep.
Organ denotations have always fallen short of the demand and all the advancement in medicine and technology has not been able to fill this gap. According to a Donate Life report, 120,000 men, women and children currently need lifesaving organ transplants each year and a new name is adding to the waiting list every 10 minutes.
Hoping to solve this problem, scientists have started working on projects to build artificial but functional human organs in laboratories. In one such endeavor, researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston have been able to create an artificial human ear from cows and sheep tissues, reports BBC News. The ear was created using a wire frame that took the 3D shape of a real human ear.
In the study, published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, researchers revealed that the new ear not only had the same "natural elastic bending" real ears have, but it also has the same shape, showing "minimal shrinkage" compared to other ears not grown on a framework.
"This research is a significant step forward in preparing the tissue-engineered ear for human clinical trials," Dr. Thomas Cervantes, who led the study, told the BBC. "One, we were able to keep the shape of the ear, after 12 weeks of growth in the rat. And then secondly, we were also able to keep the natural flexibility of the cartilage," he said, pointing to significant progress made in the study.
Cervantes revealed that once the ear grew fully, it was implanted into rat and mice that purposely had compromised immune systems, which allowed the ear to connect to their blood supply, preventing the transplant from being rejected.
Though the newly developed artificial ear was smaller than a natural human ear, it was built on the scale of a real ear taken from CT scans.
This is not the first time scientists have successfully created an artificial ear. Earlier in July, researchers from Indiana University created an artificial ear from stem cells.
"We were surprised to see that once stem cells are guided to become inner-ear precursors and placed in 3-D culture, these cells behave as if they knew not only how to become different cell types in the inner ear, but also how to self-organize into a pattern remarkably similar to the native inner ear," Dr. Eri Hashino, Ph.D., Ruth C. Holton Professor of Otolaryngology at Indiana University, said in a press statement. "Our initial goal was to make inner-ear precursors in culture, but when we did testing we found thousands of hair cells in a culture dish."
