Sick body parts? Just grow new ones

In 1980, when I was 14, one of my most thrilling encounters was with body parts trapped in solutions and enclosed in jars. The room where these jars were located was the automatic destination for me and my best friend whenever classes were unexpectedly called off. She and I did these sorties into this strange room in the university near our high school. I don’t think we’re allowed to go there, but for some reason, it seemed the guard assigned decided not to see us whenever we made our way to inspect the floating wonders. If that room still exists today, it would probably include body parts that are not “dead” – just new ones that are being grown.

Last November, I attended a conference with Nobel Laureate Shinya Yamanaka as the keynote speaker. Together with John B. Gurdon, Yamanaka was awarded the 2012 Nobel prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering that the clock could be turned back in adult stem cells so that they could turn into any kind of cells. During the conference, Yamanaka told us a powerful story. He shared that his father was one of the main drivers of his passion for medical science. His father passed away in 1989, when Yamanaka had just started his medical residency. His father had hepatitis C from a blood transfusion, and it had no treatment back then. In 2007, Yamanaka and his team were able to figure out how to coax adult skin stem cells to go back in time, to a starting point where they could turn into any kind of cell. This was extremely useful in medicine, as new kinds of treatments can now be tested in actual cells that could be grown out of one’s body, greatly increasing the chances of their effectivity. This includes treatments for hepatitis C, which caused his father’s death.

Because of that discovery, and other related ones that now contribute to a new age in medical research, medicine has firmly defined new territory: cellular medicine.

It makes so much sense to go back to the most basic organized unit of life – the cell – if we want to treat diseases, yet medical science had to work backwards to realize it. Humans encounter nature’s effects first, so we work our way backwards to understand more. Throughout that journey, we humans have come up with many ideas on how our bodies worked.

Skipping the greater part of human history when people assigned a divine cause to both maladies and redemption, we eventually arrived at a point when we started theorizing and also testing. From the time of Hippocrates, and even Galen later on, when “human moods” was a general term they also used to cover medical conditions, they thought human fluids were the key to understanding human physiology. Starting in the 1500s, when the idea of pathogens occurred to medical thinkers and experimenters, it became a path that unraveled to come up with cures and treatments that attack these “invaders” of the human body and mind, killing them without killing the patient. It was a hugely successful story of medical redemption, not to mention redemption and salvation from human suffering which used to be credited only to the divine.

Today, many laboratories around the world are growing body parts for research. These are not exactly “organs” but “organoids” – a 3D scaffolding of cells responsible for specific functions of organs. For example, lung cells that are responsible for receiving and expelling air are grown so that they could test treatments for lung diseases like cystic fibrosis, which is characterized by this problem of receiving and expelling air. Tests are done in these organoids first, instead of directly testing it on human patients. One day, scientists are hoping they could make transplants of organoids, or a whole new organ when they are able to make a successful assemblage of the many kinds of cells that work to form an organ.

Organoids are not as conspicuous looking as body parts in formalin. They are in petri dishes because these organoids are very small – about the width of a human hair to only about 5 mm – so they are studied and manipulated while looking through microscopes.

We now have organoids for multiple human organs, including the brain. In a 2015 Ted Talk by physician Siddhartha Mukherjee, he nailed it by saying that we are now curing diseases with our own cells and not simply with pills. He clearly made me see how medical science is now moving from curing or treating diseases by “killing” the cause, to growing a new part. Taken from our own cells, cellular treatments give us a better shot that our organs will reboot, or at least give us more time. In the case of my father who had liver cancer but who still lived a productive 7 years after his diagnosis, it’s these kinds of treatments that arose out of cellular medicine that gave him more time with us.

Naturally, the ethical dimensions of growing body parts – whether organoids or organs – need to be discussed. In the days of the ancient medical heavyweights Hippocrates (c. 460–c. 370 BC) and Galen (129 AD–c.  200/c.  216), they were also philosophers. Science then was not removed from methodical ruminations about life and meaning. Medicine has specialized so much since then, that we have a discipline called “ethics” to explore and discuss the possible consequences of breakthroughs. This is especially true in the case of brain organoids which could potentially grow to become a brain – an organ which, before this knowledge and capability, came only to existence inside the head of a human when he or she is born.

Like all technology, the outcome of organoid-growing will depend on how we humans take it. What if one day, a real brain is born without a body? Whose mind will that be? – Rappler.com

Maria Isabel Garcia is a science writer. She has written two books, “Science Solitaire” and “Twenty One Grams of Spirit and Seven Ounces of Desire.” You can reach her at sciencesolitaire@gmail.com.