(already subscribe? log in).

Bioartificial organs may ease need for donors

THIS STORY APPEARED IN

January 16, 2012|By Karen Weintraub

Harvard Bioscience, of Holliston, creates a trachea for patient Christopher… (THOMAS GROSSE/HARVARD…)

Christopher Lyles celebrated with a breakfast of pancakes, eggs, and bacon when he arrived home in Baltimore last week, two months after becoming the second patient ever to receive an artificial trachea, made of a plastic scaffold seeded with his own cells.

When he was diagnosed with throat cancer in early June, doctors told him surgery was his only hope for long-term survival. But conventional surgical techniques would not work because his tumor was too large for his trachea to be closed around it.

So, Lyles, 30, opted for the experimental surgery.

The need for artificial tracheas is small, with just 1,800 trachea cancer patients a year. Eventually, though, researchers hope to be able to use the same basic technique to manufacture all sorts of “bioartificial’’ organs, from relatively simple tubes like the trachea to complex parts like the lungs, heart, and kidneys.

Harvard Bioscience Inc., the Holliston company that made Lyles’s new trachea, anticipates the bioartificial-organ transplant industry will eventually top $1 billion a year.

The company makes bioreactors, the machines - part incubator, part rotisserie - in which the organ scaffolds are basted with cells. Until the recent trachea procedures, all of its bioreactors had been used for scientific research.

Harvard Bioscience hopes to get in on the ground floor of the nascent synthetic organ transplant industry.

“We see a very large market, because it’s a very large, unmet medical need,’’ said Harvard Bioscience’s president, David Green.

Roughly 100,000 Americans are on waiting lists for new organs, most of which come from deceased donors. The lucky ones whose bodies accept new organs will have to remain on antirejection drugs for the rest of their lives, tamping down their immune systems and making them more vulnerable to infections and other side effects.

The hope for bioartificial organs is that patients won’t have to wait for a death to receive a donated organ and won’t have to risk rejection. When the scaffold is coated with the person’s own stem cells, the body may be tricked into thinking the new organ belongs and may not mount an immune system attack.

Researchers started with the trachea because it is a fairly simple tube, shaped like a railroad tunnel with a fork at one end. It has a small surface area, and, since it carries air inside, needs only a blood supply to its exterior. Previous attempts at implanting synthetic tracheas have failed.