Tofu, spinach, ice... These ingredients can act as tissue stents in artificial organs.

Tofu,
,
spinach,
, ice... These
the
of the world of vegetarianism, and their change will become the backbone of organ transplantation.
a recent academic review by researchers at Lowell University in Massachusetts, usa, explores the feasibility of using everyday materials such as eggshells, tofu and spinach as tissue stents. "These traditional materials, which are taken from natural sources, seem to be more functional, more sustainable and less costly." The paper's author, Gulden, an associate professor at Lowell University in Massachusetts, believes natural materials will be suitable for many areas of biomedical research.
, according to authoritative statistics, more than 16,000 organ transplants were performed in China in 2017 and nearly 10,000 in the first half of 2018, an increase of 18% year-on-year. Although voluntary donation is still the only legal source of organ transplantation in China, with the maturity and progress of transplantation technology, the demand for transplantation and repair of organs is still growing, and tissue engineering technology hopes to become a beneficial supplement by synthetic methods. Therefore, the great increase in the accessability of tissue stents is likely to solve the "bottleneck" problem for organ transplantation."home
for transplanted functional cells, biological materials are a very important component of a tissue-engineered organ, in addition to the seed cells that function as life.
"Single cell transplantation is not easy to survive, nor is it 'grouped'." Gu Hanqing, a professor at Tianjin Medical University, introduced in summing up the industrialization of tissue engineering technology that cell carriers and tissue structure stents must be provided for the construction of tissue engineering, so biological materials are needed. In layman's terms, biological materials are to transplant functional cells to build a "home", even "home" together to move past, so that foreign cells have a support and dependence, and then survive.
" tissue stents and their materials are among the most critical factors affecting tissue building. Gu Hanqing introduced that biological materials for seed cells to provide suitable for their growth, substitlytic synthesis and other functions of biological space, to overcome the cell transplantation in the cell is not easy to survive, low substitlytic synthesis ability and other shortcomings. Biomass materials commonly used in tissue engineering can be divided into natural materials and synthetic materials by source, and polymer materials, biocess ceramics and biomass materials according to their chemical composition.
Because it is to be implanted in the body, even in the core part of the human body, there are many demanding requirements for the selection of tissue engineering biomass, such as biodegradability, good biosyndability, low immunogenicity and certain spatial structure, pore rate, degradation rate and other characteristics.
and physical properties of the surface of the stent material can have an effect on seed cells or growth factors, as well as on the adhesion and proliferation of seed cells, and may also affect the function of seed cells or growth factors. For example, collagen is a commonly used stent material, but due to the current use of heterogeneity collagen, there are certain immune response problems, the seed cells may have some impact.
With the ability to imitate nature's "ghost work" at the cellular molecular level, the third generation of tissue engineering biomass combines the two independent concepts of bioactive materials with biodegradable materials to induce cell proliferation, differentiation, and even synthesis and assembly of extracellular substrates to activate the body's regeneration system through molecular modification on biodegradable materials.Grow heart tissue on spinach bones
While mainstream innovation focuses on molecular-level "synthetic" "re-creation" and painstaking search, another group of researchers instead seeks more functional, more sustainable, and less costly materials from everyday materials at their reach.
recent organizational engineering techniques are relatively expensive, and some of them may require long and cumbersome optimization procedures to generate these 3D brackets," he said. The shift to nature is likely to be cost-effective and sustainable, Goulden said.
, inspired by spinach's dense network of veins similar to the human heart's vascular network, researchers at the U.S. Worcester Institute of Technology tried to grow heart tissue on spinach bones by cleaning plant cells and leaving a plant wall substation.
A variety of other natural materials are also being studied: tofu is used as a protein-rich stent to help wound healing by promoting cell adhesion; adding calcium-rich eggshells to strengthen the stent material can promote bone healing and nerve tissue regeneration; and some studies have taken inspiration from origami to build three-dimensional paper stents to grow bone tissue.
Goulden believes that until now the medical potential of eggshells has not been developed, and he and his colleagues have used a new medium that allows eggshells to grow new bone tissue to help bones regenerate after trauma. They have now experimented in mice and are likely to be used in the future to treat people with bone injuries such as fractures. Scientists will transplant new tissue from damaged bone tissue sites, a new material that speeds up bone transplant healing.
gel mixture was implanted in rats and found to be compatible, and bone cell matching was collected from transplanted people and used for the treatment of human fractures, Goulden said. The millions of tons of eggshell waste thrown away every year around the world will be used in another way.
, scientists are optimistic about backtracking on natural biological materials, and significantly reducing costs is an irreplaceable advantage for these natural derivatives. Not only for organ sources "thirsty", but also greatly reduce the price of clinical use, will make the widespread use of organ transplantation possible. But the "pastoral" tissue re-creation is still some way from a real clinical trial, before that, there is a long way to go to determine standard solutions, verify the efficacy of biomass, patient safety, and so on.Zhang Jiaxing.