StemCell Therapy

RACHEL THOMAS

Last updated19:30, August 30 2017

SUPPLIED

Tiny rat hearts growing in dishes in a move that Australian plastic surgeon Wayne Morrison hopes will one day be able to help humans.

"We're growing little beating hearts in dishes," Professor Wayne Morrison says, deadpan.

The man behind Australia's first hand transplanthas spent his life reattaching and transplanting body parts. Now he's working to see if we can regrow them ourselves.

As part of his work as director of Melbourne's BernardO'Brien Instituteof Microbiology, Morrison hasgrown hearts to maturity on the legs of rats and retransplanted them inside their bodies.

RACHEL THOMAS/STUFF

Morrison with leading Kiwi plastic surgeon Swee Tan at the Gillies McIndoe Research Institute in Wellington.

The next step is humans:"Our core interestis in trying to grow fat tissue and skin to repair people."

READ MORE:*Christchurch research key to printing human body parts*Scientists convert spinach leaves into human hearttissue that beats*Grant for NZ scientist seeking ways to use fish eyes to repair human corneas

With this in mind, he has been in Wellington to talk tissue engineering with leading plastic surgeon SweeTan, founder of the Gillies McIndoe Research Institute (GMRI) in Newtown, as well as to give a public lecture on his work.

RACHEL THOMAS/STUFF

The cell and tissue culture lab at the Gillies McIndoe Research institute, where Tan is engineering tissue.

We're "miles away" from growing a fully functional heart for humans, Morrison said, but the work could have a massive impactfor burns victims, mastectomy patients, and those waiting for vital organs such as lungs and hearts in the future.

"First, you want to be able to grow tissue that will not be rejected."

It all comes down tofiguring out how the building blocks of the body stem cells lead to growth of new tissue.

REUTERS

A rat with a human ear growing on its back, reportedly pictured by a Shanghai university in the 1990s. Morrison hopes a similar process can be used to grow vital organs for human transplants in the future.

New developments mean expertscan take a piece of skin and recreate the embryo which means it can be manipulated and growninto any type of tissue, he said.

Tanhas pioneered research at GMRIon targeting specific cancer stem cellswhich if manipulated properly would mean doctors could nip certain types of cancer in the bud.

InMelbourne, Morrison recentlytrialleda way ofregrowingbreastsin four mastectomy patients.

About 30mlof fatty tissue was inserted under the skin in a 200ml special chamber,and in one patient, that chamber filled completely with new tissue.

The key is to understand how that happened, and why it didn't work in the three other patients. "It is a principle, that you can grow or expand tissue."

A long-time plastic surgeon, Morrison has always been in the business of putting people back together.

He cited a "face amputation" about 20 years ago as the most complex and rewardingprocedures he's ever done.

An Australian womangot her ponytail caught in a milking machine near Melbourne. She was scalped from the back of her head down to her jawline.

"This one, extraordinarily, took the whole face off. I think there's only one other ever been reported in the world.

"Reattachingthat took 24 hours or so, and we didn't know if it would surviveor not. Fortunately the face did;a lot of the scalp tissue did not."

It's those horrifying cases thatled to both him and Tan seekingmore solutions for victims of cancer or freak accidents.

"Thecomplications of the drugs you have to take are morbid, and they will eventually kill you."

Frenchwoman IsabelleDinoirewas theworld's first recipient of afacialtransplant in 2005, butdied last year after developing two kinds ofof cancer.

But as Morrison says: "If you see someone with facial injuries or burns, you'd need a hard heart to say, 'No, you can't have a transplant' that would be horrendous."

-Stuff

More here:
Recreating breasts and beating hearts: how tissue engineering is changing medicine - The Dominion Post

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