On the heels of being nominated as one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People, Doris Taylor, PhD, director of the Center for Cardiovascular Research (CCVR) at the University of Minnesota, is pushing the boundaries of her research to bring whole organ decellularization closer to viability for human transplantation. Taylor’s breakthrough experiment involved draining a rat heart of its cells and reinfusing the remaining shell with neonatal heart cells from other rats. The cells developed and grew in the lab, eventually advancing enough to get the dead heart pumping and beating again. Taylor’s ultimate goal is to treat the shells of pig organs — or extracellular matrix scaffolds — with human stem cells to grow organs that can be used for human transplantation. In the year since her work was published in the Nature Medicine, Taylor’s team has expanding its research to other rat organs, such as the liver, kidneys, and lungs. The lab is also working to optimize the best procedures for decellularizing pig hearts, which are the next step in the journey toward human transplantation, says Claudia Zierold, the CCVR’s scientific director.

More than 100,000 people in the U.S. are currently waiting for new organs, according to the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network, yet only about 30,000 received organ donations last year, reports the United Network for Organ Sharing. Taylor’s research could have a significant impact on the organ transplantation pipeline. Given the proper resources, Taylor believes the heart process could be in clinical trials within five to six years, and she next plans to turn her attention to livers. “Eight months ago, we could barely say anything but ‘heart,’” Taylor says. “Now we’re pretty far down the road in thinking about organs like liver, and [we] have started conversations with collaborators all around the world about how we might move this forward to other tissues.” The next steps are securing continued funding and talking to industry about commercializing the process, she adds.

Go to: mndaily

Posted April 15th, 2009 under Tech Transfer

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