Anthony Atala: Growing New Organs

Anthony Atala's mention some very interesting things in his TED Talk. For instance, every 30 seconds, a patient dies from diseases that could be treated with tissue replacement. Stem cells can work, like what we've been talking about in class. But research and studies on how to use stem cells hasn't exactly been fully explored yet, in terms of actual therapies for organs, as Atala mentioned in his talk.

I also learned from this talk that our bodies are constantly regenerating, especially as we get older. When there is an injury, things get tricky. When there is an injury or disease, the body's (part where inury or disease is located) first reaction is to seal itself off from the rest of the body to fight off infections. This sealing is called scar tissue.

Atala's big question throughout this talk is can we grow organs instead of having to transplant them? He talks about how if a patient were to have a disease or injury (in larger organs), you can remove a small piece of tissue from that organ, take the tissue apart and look at the basic components of it, then you take those cells out and grow/expand them. Then you put them in the body using a scaffold (?) to bring the cells into the body. Once the cells are in the body and the tissue is regenerated, the scaffold disintegrates. I think it is kind of like the ear we talked about in class.