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Growing an artificial leg

20.06.2015

Our legs and arms are made of muscles, bones, cartilage, blood vessels, ligaments, skin, and all of it is connected so skillfully that it seems easier to replace a lost arm or leg with a completely artificial prosthesis than to try to repeat nature exactly. However, this is exactly what researchers at the Massachusetts General Hospital managed to do, who were able to recreate a limb from cellular material. True, so far we are not talking about human hands and feet, but about the paw of a rat.

The essence of the work was as follows. As you know, in addition to cells in any organs and tissues, there is also an intercellular matrix consisting of proteins, glycoproteins, lipids, etc. The matrix helps the cell mass to keep its shape, forming something like a scaffold for which cells can hold on. They can be removed with the help of special detergents, and the frame itself will remain intact. And so, passing the detergent through the forelimb taken from a dead rat, Harald Ott (Harald C. Ott) and his colleagues cleaned off all the cells from it, but so that the matrix of blood vessels and muscles remained in place. The procedure took 52 hours, and what happened with the paw can be seen here. The result was something like a three-dimensional contour of a limb, which now had to be filled with new cellular content.

The paw was placed in a bioreactor, in which it was to grow cells. First, they were grown separately, and then they were injected into an "empty" limb: the cells that were supposed to restore the vessels were placed in the matrix left over from the veins and arteries, those that were supposed to restore the muscles were injected into the muscle membranes. After five days, the limb was treated with a weak electric current so that the muscle cells formed the correct muscles, and after two weeks they checked what happened.

In an article in Biomaterials, the authors write that both vascular and muscle cells did everything right. The rat's foot received new vessels and new muscles, and when it was transplanted into another rat, the vessels provided blood circulation, and the muscles contracted in response to electrical stimulation - the foot flexed at the wrist and flexed the phalanges of the fingers. It is worth noting, however, that there were no nerves in the paw, so that the rat could not control the new front leg. Researchers are going to work on the restoration of the nervous system in the near future, so that the transplanted limb can be felt and controlled.

In itself, transplanting an arm or leg from one person to another is no longer new, but in this case it is often necessary to pacify the immunity that attacks the new limb as a foreign body. With the help of progenitor cells taken from the patient himself, it would be possible to grow all the necessary tissues of the leg or arm, but another problem arises here: how to organize these tissues in the right way. So far, it has not been possible to grow a limb from scratch (unless you try to print it on a 3D printer), but you can try using some kind of frame. Of course, there may also be problems with the immune system, but not at all the same as with a transplant of the entire leg or arm, with all their cells.

By the way, the authors of the work in the same way managed to clean the front arm of the baboon from cells, so all that remains is to correctly "stuff" it with human muscle, nerve and epithelial cells - and the new arm will be ready.

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Main Features:

input voltage range 4,5...75 V;
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