專題討論3:發育生物學與再生醫學新進展
Recent Advance in Developmental Biology and Regeneration Medicine

S3-2
Current Status in Organ Regeneration & Application
曹伯年
台大醫院小兒部
台灣大學發育生物學與再生醫學研究中心

  Although stem cell-base therapy could leads to develop potential new treatments for several diseases that currently lack of effect treatments, including cancers, neurodegenerative diseases and cardiovascular diseases, organ transplantation remains the only definitive treatment for the end-stage organ failure disorders. However, the supply of donor organs is always limited. The ability to bioengineer organs would solve this problem. Two years ago, Macchiarini and colleagues described successful transplantation of a tissue-engineered airway to treat a patient with a large airway defect. Although it raised several questions about the problem for revascularization and lacking detailed follow-up of morphological changes to the patient’s trachea, it is still very exciting news for us. Taking the similar approach by regenerating cell population to the decellularized scaffold of the native organ, lots of bio-hybrid organs including heart, kidney, lung and liver were successfully regenerated in animals recently. The promise of this tissue-engineering approach is its potential to expand the pool of donor organs or we can decellularize the damaged cells from the patient’s organ followed by regeneration to a healthy status. To promote this clinical application, a team work including the experts of the stem cell research, biomaterial science, developmental biology, regeneration medicine and clinical research is crucially required.