NMA, others laud lab-grown kidneys’ transplant

[TGD]

 REPORT of the first successful transplant of laboratory-grown kidneys in rats, may have raised the hopes of millions of patients with end stage kidney damage in dire need of donors.

Scientists in Nigeria including the President of the Nigerian Medical Association (NMA), Dr. Osahon Enabulele, and President, Pharmaceutical Society of Nigeria (PSN), Olumide Akintayo, are excited over the feat by their colleagues at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, United States, who on Monday reported to have fitted rats with kidneys that were grown in a lab from stripped-down kidney scaffolds.

They called on researchers, physicians/clinical pathologists, scientists, various research institutions and universities in Nigeria to take up the challenge of the breakthrough by not only replicating the study in the country but even advancing it further, especially as there was greater burden of management of chronic renal disease in Nigeria and other developing countries.

They said without adequate funding by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, perhaps the world would not have been availed of this landmark achievement, and therefore called on federal, state and local governments as well as private entrepreneurs to take active and serious interest in the funding of researches in Nigeria so that researchers in the country could produce even better research findings.

Reacting to the breakthrough, the NMA President said: "It is a major breakthrough and landmark development. It will sort out the long waiting time for patients with end stage kidney damage for donor kidney. This holds promise for them."

Enabulele, however, called for caution. "As well as we celebrate there is need for caution. There is need for more studies especially in humans to know whether it is possible in humans. We also have to be careful because of Lassa fever. Rats are careers of Lassa fever. We need to wait for further studies to know how applicable it is to humans," the NMA president said.

Akintayo said: "A regenerated kidney that could be implanted in humans remains very, very far in the future. In almost every area in medicine, the leap from rodent to man has been extraordinarily difficult, and that has seemed to be the case with organ scaffolds as well. However, that the team's work still provides a platform for understanding how kidneys develop and repair themselves. This may end up being the area in which the paper has the most impact."

According to the work published yesterday in Nature Medicine, when transplanted these 'bioengineered' organs starting filtering the rodents' blood and making urine.

The team, led by organ-regeneration specialist Harald Ott, started with the kidneys of recently deceased rats and used detergent to strip away the cells, leaving behind the underlying scaffold of connective tissues such as the structural components of blood vessels.

They then regenerated the organ by seeding this scaffold with two cell types: Human umbilical-vein cells to line the blood vessels, and kidney cells from newborn rats to produce the other tissues that make up the organ. Ott and his colleagues developed this method in 2008, and have since used it to grow hearts and lungs.Currently, patients who develop the most severe forms of kidney disease can be kept alive with dialysis, but only a transplant will cure them.

About 20 per cent of Nigerians are said to be suffering from chronic kidney disease (CKD) and require dialysis or kidney transplant. It is estimated that over 10,000 Nigeria are waiting for a donor kidney compared to around 100,000 people in the United States.



The Guardian

[Shola Sholaz]

I just don't like the idea of Nigerians going over to Malaysia to exchange their kidney for money. It doesn't speak well of Africa