A ghostly white substance floating in a large jar, just a few hours ago, was a strong reddish-brown color of a healthy organ - a pig's liver.. Now it is translucent, white tubes of vessels, like branches on a tree, shine through..., AP NEWC sewn.

It's a pig's liver that is slowly transforming to look and act like a human, as part of a long-term effort by scientists to alleviate the nation's transplant shortage with bioengineered organ replacements..

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The first thing the staff at this lab in suburban Minneapolis shampooed was pig cages.. What's left is the foam-like, honeycomb structure of the liver, with empty blood vessels..

Now human liver cells, taken from donor organs that cannot be transplanted, will fill these cells, seep into them and restart the functions of the organ already as the liver of a particular person..

“Essentially we are re-growing the organ,” said Jeff Ross, CEO of Miromatrix. “Our bodies will no longer perceive it as a pig organ.”.

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This is a bold statement.. Sometime in 2023, Miromatrix plans to conduct a first-of-its-kind human trial of a bioengineered organ to start trying to prove it..

If the Food and Drug Administration agrees, the initial experiment will be conducted outside the patient's body.. Researchers will place a human-transformed liver next to a hospital bed to temporarily filter the blood of a person whose own liver has suddenly failed.. And if the functions of the liver work, this will be an important step towards attempting a bioengineered transplant of an organ - possibly a kidney..

“It all sounds like science fiction, but you have to start somewhere,” said Dr. Sander Florman, head of transplantation at New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital, one of several hospitals already planning to participate in liver research.. “This is probably a more near future than xenotransplantation or direct implantation of animal organs into humans.”.

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Over 105,000 people are on the waiting list for organ transplants in the US. Thousands will die before their turn comes.

“The number of organs we have will never be able to meet the demand,” said Dr. Amit Tevar, a transplant surgeon at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center..

That's why scientists see animals as another source of organs. A Marylander lived two months after he received the world's first heart transplant last January from a pig, an animal genetically modified so that its organs do not elicit an immediate attack from the human immune system.. FDA Considers More Xenotransplant Experiments Using Gene-Edited Pig Kidneys or Hearts. But the risk is huge.

For their part, bioengineered organs are markedly different from those of gene-edited animals - special pigs are not required, just organs from a slaughterhouse are needed, which will serve as a scaffold for a new human liver..

“This is something that, in the long term, can help develop the production of organs that we can use for people,” said Tevar from Pittsburgh..

The Miromatrix approach is based on research in the early 2000s, when regenerative medicine specialist Doris Taylor and Dr. Harald Ott of the University of Minnesota pioneered a way to completely decellularize a dead rat heart.. The team seeded the resulting voids with immature rat heart cells, which eventually made the small organ beat.. There were international international headlines.

Fast-forward, and now the Miromatrix University spin-off has rows of large jars pumping fluids and nutrients to the liver and kidneys at various stages of their metamorphosis..

Ross said the new technique - the complete removal of pig cells - eliminates some of the risks of xenotransplantation, such as latent animal viruses or rejection..

Recall that scientists from the Weizmann Institute in Israel were the first in the world to create " At the same time, the researchers did not need sperm, eggs and the fertilization process..