Lab-grown “mini guts” are helping scientists unravel how organs mature and providing clues on how certain diseases might be treated. The experimental procedure may help patients with cystic fibrosis, a disease that fills the lungs with thick mucus.
Researchers in the Netherlands scrape cells from a patient and use them to grow a mini version of his or her large intestine in a petri dish. When the “mini gut” responds to treatment, doctors know it will help the patient too.
Els van der Heijden was an early recipient of the treatment. “I really felt, physically, like a different person,” she says after taking a drug custom-made for her.
The experiment aims to grow mini intestines for every Dutch patient with cystic fibrosis.
The Dutch experiment is an early version of a technique being worked on in labs all over the world: Researchers are learning to grow organs outside of the body for treatment—and maybe someday for transplants.
“The mini guts are small, but they are complete,” says Dr. Hans Clevers, who pioneered the technique. Except for muscles and blood vessels, the tiny organs “have everything you would expect to see in a real gut, only on a really small scale.”
Clevers hopes one day to make organs that are not so mini.
“My dream would be to be able to custom-make organs,” he says. He imagines a future where doctors might have a “freezer full of livers” to choose from when sick patients arrive.
(AP Photo: Mini organs created from the intestinal tissue of a patient)
