Experts urge caution as lab-grown organ success raises transplant hopes

MEDICAL experts have sounded a note of caution after the world’s first human organ grown in a laboratory and transplanted successfully into a human was announced.

Transplant groups said it was “vital” that people continued to sign up to organ donor registers in spite of a medical breakthrough in the US in which seven young patients received new bladders.

The study, published online in The Lancet medical journal, has prompted hopes major organs such as hearts could be regenerated in the future.

Until now, only simpler tissues such as skin, bone and cartilage have been grown in laboratories.

The breakthrough is the first time a more intricate organ has been mostly replaced with tissue grown from a patient’s own cells.

For 16-year-old Kaitlyne McNamara, the transplant has meant a new social life.

At the time of her surgery five years ago, her kidneys were close to failing as a result of her weak bladder. Now, they are working again, and she no longer wears a nappy. Instead, she was waiting for alternations on a champagne-coloured dress for her junior prom.

“Now I can go have fun and not worry about having an accident,” she said last week near her home in Middletown, Connecticut.

Dr Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, welcomed the breakthrough as “a milestone”.

But he also sounded a note of caution: “I think we need to just temper this a little bit. The bladder is a relatively simple structure. Something like a kidney or a liver is a much more complicated organ and the idea of simply growing a kidney in a laboratory is a very tough thing to really think about. Nevertheless, this does open up the possibility of using, for example, stem cells to grow organs and meet that huge patient need.”

Dr Horton added: “One of the real difficulties is that we have not been able to persuade the public that giving organs at the point of death is a huge public obligation. That has also led to a brick wall in the development of transplantation services.”

He predicted the next decade would herald “a revolution” in transplantation.

The bladder transplants were performed on seven patients aged from four to 19 years old.

A research team at Children’s Hospital in Boston, carried out the first procedure in 1999.

The results were not announced until the doctors carried out the other surgery and followed the progress of the last patient for almost two more years.

Some researchers were more cautious about the promise shown with the new procedure. Dr Joseph Zwischenberger, who edits the journal of the American Society of Artificial Internal Organs, questioned how well the new bladders worked in the first few patients and raised a “red flag” about two patients who left the study and were ultimately omitted from results.