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organ transplants

Donate organs? No, grow them from scratch

BERLIN -- Medical science, boosted by manufacturing and information technology, is on the cusp of being able to grow human tissue.

So believes Nina Tandon, a senior fellow at Columbia University's Lab for Stem Cells and Tissue Engineering, who for her Ph.D. thesis grew cardiac cells that beat like tiny hearts.

A third age of medicine is beginning, she said in a speech here at the TEDx Berlin conference held in conjunction with IFA consumer-electronics show. The first age, most of human history, had only a primitive understanding of the body. The second age ran from the first … Read more

Scientists grow working, miniature livers

Let's just say it's a good thing this breakthrough didn't come around when I was in my early twenties, or I may have been tempted to spend a little more time at my favorite neighborhood watering hole.

Scientists at the Institute for Regenerative Medicine at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center say they've successfully used human liver cells to create miniature livers that function like their larger, more naturally derived counterparts.

Using a process called decellularization, the team rinsed real livers from an unspecified animal with detergent, stripping them of all their cells and leaving only … Read more