It did not take long for most of this criticism to dissipate. Within a couple of years, the public became accustomed to the idea of heart transplants and then they welcomed them. Last year, about 10,000 people worldwide had heart transplants, while nearly 165,000 people received a kidney, liver, lung or pancreas.
A three-year-old startup named Kind Biotechnology has begun work on what it calls an integrated organ network, or ION. This acronym undersells what Kind is making, which is a collection of organs that can be grown inside of an animal’s womb and then harvested for transplantation. Cue the gasps from some and the cheers from others.
By creating a series of genetic edits, Kind can alter the development of an embryo so that it forms organs without also forming limbs, a central nervous system and brain. The result is a group of organs growing in the womb. It sounds like science fiction, but Kind has already done this hundreds of times in mice and now rats, according to Justin Rebo, the company’s founder and CEO.
In the months ahead, Kind plans to expand its technology to larger mammals like pigs and possibly sheep with the hopes of producing organs good enough to endure the transplantation process. One day, Rebo expects that humans might be able to use these animal-grown organs to deal with medical emergencies and to help people live longer.
“We’re working on a platform to build abundant organ medicine, which we believe is a path not only to treating organ failure, but eventually to being more broadly medically useful and even impacting human lifespan,” Rebo says. “The point of medicine is to make people live longer and healthier lives. That’s what it’s always been. And that’s what we’re working on.”
TENS OF thousands of people languish waiting for viable organs each year. Scientists have been attempting to solve this problem for decades by trying to create individual organs in their labs. In some cases, they take the cells of an organ and then coax them into developing more fully to make, say, a lab-grown kidney or liver. Companies like United Therapeutics and eGenesis have also been editing the genes of pig organs to make them more suitable for human use.
While there has been some success with these approaches, Rebo considers them too basic and limited to produce the full complement of organs that humans need. He contends that you can’t create the best organs in isolation and that they need to develop alongside each other. “The heart relies on the kidney to modulate the system environment in the right way to allow it to live and grow,” he says. “And both rely on the lungs and the liver and so forth, and both need access to nutrients, which is provided by the intestines.”
Rebo is a doctor and scientist with a long history in the bio-tech and longevity fields. And he’s not alone on this quest to create organs inside of what could be called headless bodies. R3 Bio, co-founded by John Schloendorn and Alice Gilman, is pursuing similar technology, although without much detail as of yet. Gilman has talked about trying to create animal models that could be used for medical testing so that researchers would no longer need to experiment on living, conscious mammals like primates. RenewalBio in Israel is also believed to be working in this area, trying to build organs from a patient’s own cells. (Schloendorn and Rebo were previously collaborators.)
Before even getting to the ethical considerations of Kind’s technology, there are myriad practical, scientific matters to confront.
by Ashlee Vance, Core Memory | Read more:
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