On July 7, 2011, University College London made an announcement of an breakthrough which is an historic landmark in the field of nanotechnology in tissue engineering: surgeons in Sweden have successfully implanted, for the first time ever, a totally synthetic, tissue-engineered organ (a trachea) into a patient suffering from a terminal-stage tracheal cancer.
A team leaded by Professor Alexander Seifalian (UCL Division of Surgery & Interventional Science; professor of nanotechnology and regenerative medicine at University College London, UK), whose laboratories are headquartered at the Royal Free Hospital, created a glass mold of the patient’s trachea from X-ray computed tomography (CT) scans of the patient. In CT, digital geometry processing is employed to generate a 3D image of the inside of an object from a large series of 2D X-ray images taken around one single axis of rotation.
Then, they manufactured a full size y-shaped trachea scaffold at Professor Seifalian’s laboratories. The scaffold of the trachea was built using a novel nanocomposite polymer developed and patented by Professor Seifalian. Professor Seifalian worked together with Professor Paolo Macchiarini at Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden (who also holds an Honorary appointment at UCL).
Professor Seifalian and his team used a porous novel nanocomposite polymer to build the y-shaped trachea scaffold. The pores were millions of little holes, providing this way a place for the patient’s stem cells to grow roots. The team cut strips of the novel nanocomposite polymer and wrapped them around the glass mold creating this way the cartilage rings that conferred structural strength to the trachea.
After the scaffold construct was finished, it was taken to Karolinska Institutet where the patient’s stem cells were seeded by Professor Macchiarini’s team.
For this purpose, a solution of stem cells from the patient’s bone marrow was poured onto the synthetic trachea. The solution included chemicals that induced the cells to differentiate into the types of cells found in a trachea. Tissue was grown on top of the scaffold from the patient’s own stem cells inside a bioreactor (the InBreath, specially designed for the procedure by Harvard Bioscience) to:
- Protect the organ;
- Provide the correct environment for cells differentiation and tissue growth (e.g. sterile and warm);
- Promote cell differentiation and growth.
It took about two days for tissues to form the world first totally synthetic, tissue-engineered trachea.
Finally, the implant surgery was carried out (June 2011) by Professor Macchiarini (at KarolinskaUniversityHospital in Huddinge, Stockholm, Sweden). The patient has now made a full recovery.
This work is highly relevant due to the following reasons:
- It is a pioneer work:
- In the field of nanomaterials. The nanomaterials have other potential uses such as coronary stents and grafts;
- In the field of nanotechnology applied to the construction of scaffolds for tissue engineering. Scaffolds play a key role in regenerative medicine and tissue engineering. Doors will be opened to the improvement of these constructs;
- In the field of nanotechnology applied to tissue engineering. Doors will be opened to mere breakthroughs in the field of regenerative medicine and regenerative medicine;
- In the field of nanotechnology applied to the organ transplantation. Under de complexity perspective, trachea is a simple organ. However, doors will be opened to the transplantation of com complex organs, artificial by nature;
- It is an important advance in the field of personalized medicine, since the artificial trachea was custom made.
Besides, artificial organs are superior to donor organs:
- They can be obtained more quickly than a donor organ can often be found;
- Are grown from the patient’s own cells;
- They do not require dangerous immunosuppressant drugs to prevent rejection (rejection is out of the equation).
Furthermore, one of the technologies intensively studied in nanotechnology in regenerative medicine and tissue engineering is nanoscale topography and nanoscale engineering of the surface of cells and tissues. These techniques employed are several, and include:
- Nanolithography;
- 3D printing.
I strongly believe that very soon it will be possible to print in 3D the mold of a customized scaffold for regenerative medicine and tissue engineering purposes.
This will open doors to the capability of 3 D printing the scaffold itself.
3D printers will also be available.
Finally, the nanotechnology-based tissue engineering, regenerative medicine and organ transplantation will be a routine practice of nanomedicine.
To get to grips with nanotechnology, you need to start with this!
I always count myself lucky that I have never had a standard job. From my first job with VG Ionex testing and tweaking a wide variety of ion guns (but try getting one through an airport without saying ‘gun!’) to my current bipolar technology/fashion enterprises I’ve rarely done the same thing two days in a row. So far this week I’ve been sorting through fashion photographs as a result of a recent fashion shoot, had an email conversation with a scientist/entrepreneur so well known and respected that even I felt humbled, and spent a morning discussing issues facing aviation and mass tourism with a senior figure from a FTSE 100 quoted travel firm.
What has this got to do with nanotechnology and other emerging technologies? Quite a lot as it turns out.
A key part of what we have done at Cientifica over the past ten years has been to make accurate predictions bout the direction technology will take, and between myself and ‘The Nanoclast‘ we’ve done a pretty good job or predicting the future while avoiding the worst of the pitfalls.One of the reasons for this is that we haven’t limited ourselves to technology, but spend a huge amount of time getting to grips with the issues facing a wide range of industries, as well as global macroeconomic trends, all of which help us make better decisions on what technologies our clients should back, or steer well clear of.
A typical example of how technology predictions can be totally wrong is in the aerospace industry. For almost ten years a variety of pundits have been claiming that the use of nanotube based composites can make aircraft lighter and more fuel efficient, but it just hasn’t happened. The reason is (at least) twofold, driven by two different factors, the supply chain and regulation.
A problem faced by a a number of emerging technologies is the lack of supply chain maturity. For a material to be considered usable most industries a prerequisite would be to have three or four financially stable producers with decent quality control in place so that the same material is guaranteed every time, whether a few grammes or tonnes. A cluster of start ups and students working part time won’t impress Airbus Industrie or Boeing.
Qualification of materials to comply with regulation is something I spent years on at the European Space Agency. The problem is that you can’t just slap any old material into a satellite or airframe and hope it works – the consequences of failure are far too high to consider risking. So all new materials have to go through extensive testing before they can be flown, and this takes time and money. Boeings switch to composites for the 787 is already years behind schedule, and compared with the kind of materials becoming available now the 787 construction is not particularly advanced. The best data recorder for satellites was magnetic tape well into the 90′s for the same reason, a stray proton flipping a call in a solid state memory could wipe out an entire mission, but even tape jams could be fixed with a bit of jiggling about.
So, if you want to really understand nanotechnology, and do something useful with it, you have to spend as much time hanging around coffee houses and hotel bars as you do in the lab, and get through the Economist, Spectator and visit a gallery or museum every week just to put it all in context.
Variety may be the spice of life, but its just as important to nanotechnology.
Nanomaterials Producers React To Criticism Of Their Business Models
I don’t like nanomaterials companies very much. In fact they are usually nothing but trouble. If they are not squandering huge amounts of investors money chasing non existent markets then they are having messy legal spats with competitors and suppliers, or even prancing around bringing hugely expensive but ultimately pointless libel suits against anyone who questions their business model. Anyway, not to worry, most of them have either gone bust or found something more useful to do with their nanotech expertise than trying to put carts before horses and good riddance.
I’ll be doing my best to avoid a lynching at tomorrow’s Nanomaterials 2010 conference where I will be talking about “Trends and opportunities in the nanomaterials marketplace” – something I’m pretty sure that I will be able to manage without jumping up and down yelling “nanomaterials are the new gold so give me all your money” (actually as we and the World Gold Council proved a while ago, Gold is the new Gold).
However we do need to make use of nanomaterials to address a number of pressing issues caused by rising populations and declining resources unless we all want to go back to the Dark Ages, and this is where I think the opportunities lie, and perhaps this time it won’t be just large chemical producers who can take advantage.
If we look at most of our current crop of ‘sustainable’ technologies, from hybrid vehicles to wind turbines and solar arrays they are rubbish. There is absolutely no comparison with the elegance of nature’s solutions, almost all of which are built from the bottom up and which I often refer to as ‘materials by design’, a subject of eternal debate with my nanoclastic colleague Dexter Johnson. We need to start thinking seriously about how we can use our new found control over the properties of materials to address resource issues, create clean water and of course double food production in the next forty years, not producing tons of stuff that no one will ever want just because we can.
Our colleagues over at Lux Research have just had a Eureka moment and realised what we have been telling everyone since, ahem, 2002 is actually right; It’s hard to make money from nanomaterials!
Doh! Wouldn’t that have been nice to know seven years ago?
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