Biomaterial engineers at a lab in Canada successfully fused human tissue with an apple segment that, when implanted beneath the skin, will develop blood vessels and be “compatible with the body,” writes The Atlantic.
“Take a McIntosh red apple from the grocery store (or a home garden), slice it and wash it with soap, then sterilize it with boiling water…and you have a cellulose mesh ready for human cells,” The Atlantic says. Once implanted under the skin, even “[a]fter eight weeks it is still compatible with the body, with no attempt by the immune system to reject it. The plant segment is brought to life as part of an animal.”
Lead scientist Andrew Pelling said, “Biohacking is the new gardening.”
While plenty of hurdles remain before this technique could be applied medicine, the magazine wrote: “The fusion of plant and animal it represents holds promise for regenerative medicine, in which defective body parts may be replaced by engineered alternatives … Biomaterials engineers, who create stand-ins for our own body tissues, historically focus on animal species, like pigs, with organs similar to ours. Until now, the plant kingdom has been largely neglected, but it offers a vast variety of architectures, many of which can serve the needs of human physiology. It also offers an escape route from expensive, proprietary biomaterials: an open-source approach.”
According to the most recent data, more than 121,000 patients are waiting for an organ transplant, and an average of 22 people die each day while waiting, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. Scientists from the Pelling Laboratory for Biophysical Manipulation at the University of Ottawa anticipate that their fibrous apple “tissue” will revolutionize the wait list, and cut into the billion-dollar industry with a low-cost alternative.
“Few people can spend $800 per cubic centimeter of human decellularized dermal allograft tissue to reconstruct a badly torn rotator cuff in the shoulder,” says The Atlantic, “but at less than 1 cent, the same amount of apple is well within reach.”
And yet, the private sector may have to pick up much of the tab. “Globally available, locally producible, and inexpensive biomaterials could be a goal picked up by philanthropists,” the magazine said.
Jeffrey Karp, a biomaterials expert at Harvard Medical School, told The Atlantic, “This kind of exploratory work is important, because it expands the toolkit … Basic discoveries provide more options for those of us in translational medicine.”