There is a global shortage of organs for transplantation. The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that the supply meets only 10 percent of demand. In the UK alone, over 7,000 people are on the national transplant waiting list. And every year 1,300 either die while waiting for a transplant or become too ill to receive one, according to NHS Blood and Transplant figures.
This inability to match supply with demand has created an international market for body parts worth a staggering $1.2 billion annually. Much of this activity is illegal and places some of the world’s poorest people at risk of infection or exploitation.
Against this backdrop, the prospect of mass-producing artificial organs to address the shortage crisis, effectively moving from transplants to implants, is appealing. And thanks to continuing advancements in medical technology, it is becoming increasingly viable.
Artificial hearts have been used for decades to keep patients with heart failure alive until they find a donor. The first permanently implantable synthetic kidney for treating end-stage renal disease is expected to reach clinical trials by 2017. And research is underway to build artificial livers that can be given to patients with acute liver failure while their own liver repairs itself.
But scientists have now a more ambitious goal: building bespoke organs for individual patients on demand. One way to do this is to strip away the cells of a dead organ, either human or animal, and seed the scaffold of connective tissue that is left behind with stem cells from the patient who needs the implant. This is called regenerative medicine. Researchers at the Texas Heart Institute in Houston are doing jaw-dropping work growing lungs and beating hearts with this method.
The scaffold does not have to be natural, however. It can also be made from scratch using a glass mould or three-dimensional (3D) printing, and then repopulated with the patient’s cells. In fact, researchers can now fabricate entire organs using 3D printers that eject living cells rather than ink. The first non-functioning prototype of a human kidney was 3D-printed in 2013 at the Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
Bespoke artificial organs are years away from clinical use. But their potential is obvious: no more waiting lists or transplant rejection; reduced financial pressure on health systems as a result of treating more patients and curing certain chronic conditions; and the ability to test new drugs in miniature versions of real human organs rather than animals.
However, prohibitive manufacturing costs could limit implants to wealthy individuals. A steady supply of brand new organs could be misused to avoid disease prevention or enhance body performance. And, since bioengineered organs are made to last, caregivers and patients’ families may face an ethical quandary of when to switch them off in end-of-life situations.
Another question is how artificial organs will be received by patients themselves. Will they be seen as unnatural or preferable to receiving some else’s organs into one’s own body?
How would you feel about having an artificially grown organ transplanted into your body? Join the discussion on the Future Realities LinkedIn group, sponsored by Dassault Systèmes.
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