By Paul Rodgers
“No kidding, kid has grown new kidneys,” declared The Sun last week. That the child’s name is “Angel” didn’t do anything to dampen the miraculous tone of this and similar articles.
But her condition, duplex kidneys, is not that unusual, existing in about 1 per cent of the population.
Doctors say they didn’t notice the extra organs on Angel Burton’s scans before her operation three years ago to repair a failed valve that had caused her kidney infections. But that doesn’t mean that they’ve grown since. Thankfully, she’s unlikely to be subjected to a lifetime of intrusive tests as science tries to figure out her “secret”.
Regeneration in humans is rare. Children under 10 can regrow fingertips, though sans fingerprints, and even adult livers can recover from as little as 25 per cent of the original organ.
There seems to be an inverse relationship between the complexity of an organ and its ability to replace itself.
Amphibians such as newts can regenerate limbs after amputation, and when some worms are chopped in half, they can grow into two new creatures.
In newts, the cells in the stump of the amputated limb turn into undifferentiated stem cells as it starts to grow back, a clue which has inspired researchers in the field.
Regeneration scientists at Stanford University in the US and the New York University Langone Medical Center demonstrated a year ago that they could grow stem cells on a scaffold made out of blood, fat and bone tissue from rodents.
Geoffrey Gurtner, an associate professor of surgery at Stanford, and his colleagues harvested a piece of tissue containing blood vessels, fat and skin from the groin area of rodents and used a bioreactor to provide nutrients and oxygen to keep it alive. Then, they seeded the extracted tissue with stem cells before it was implanted back into the animal. Once the tissue was back in the animal, the stem cells continued to grow and were not rejected. This suggests that if the stem cells had been coaxed into becoming an organ, the organ would have “taken hold” in the animal’s body.
“The ability to provide stem cells with a scaffold to grow and differentiate into mature cells could revolutionise the field of organ transplantation,” said Gurtner.