Question: If you want to create an organ, how do you control which cells are produced?

Anzy Miller answered on 14 Nov 2013:

I am working with embryonic stem cells, and scientists have worked out what these cells need to stay as stem cells. So I can keep growing my cells in this media (like food for the cells) and they won’t turn into any other types of cells.

But we also know what other cell types need, so if i did want to turn my embryonic stem cells into e.g. brain cells, I would give some factors to my embryonic stem cells and they would change into brain cells. To find out what the cells need, we study what happens normally in the embryo when the embryo wants to make a brain – we look to see what the cells normally are surrounded by, and what factors they would need.

We can’t make all cells yet in the lab, but this is ongoing work by many scientists – to be able to make any type of cell and make it efficiently. Hopefully we will then be able to make cells that patients with diseases need – like the specific brain cells that people with Alzheimers disease need.

But if we are talking about making organs – well this gets more complicated. Not only do we need certain cell types (and for all organs, this is more than one type of cell) we also need to shape of the organ (and so the scaffold where the cells stick to) and also the blood system running through it. And then we would have to hope that it works as normal!! So its very difficult to think about making organs, but hopefully in the future we will be able to!!

🙂