Longevity science

A team of researchers from MIT and Harvard Medical School have devised a cheap way of artificially growing three-dimensional brain tissues in the lab. Built layer by layer, the tissues can take on just about any shape and closely mimic the cellular composition of the tissue found in the living brain.

The advance could allow scientists to get a closer look at how neurons form connections, predict how cells of individual patients will respond to different drugs, and even lead to the creation of bioengineered implants to replace damaged brain tissue.

In recent years, we've seen big leaps forward in the technology we use to grow artificial bones, cartilage and blood vessels. As of late, scientists have even managed to grow biocompatible (though not naturalistic) brain tissue. One big hurdle remains, however: brain tissue contains thousands of different cell types, all intricately interconnected and present in varying concentrations in different areas of the brain, which is tough to recreate in the lab.

According the UK’s National Health Service, one person in 50 over the age of 80 will develop venous leg ulcers.

The ulcers occur when high blood pressure in the veins of the legs causes damage to the adjacent skin, ultimately resulting in the breakdown of that tissue.

While the ulcers can be quite resistant to treatment, a team of scientists is now reporting success in using a sort of “spray-on skin” to heal them.

This snapshot is the result of using an Imagejs module to determine how fast brain cancer cells are growing.

A University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) team has developed ImageJS, a free app system that analyzes tissue images.

ImageJS is the first in a serie

Researchers have created a self-supporting scaffolding of nanowires and coated it with a biocompatible material. They grew heart and nerve cells within this scaffold, which developed into a single structure with embedded nanowires.

With this technology, researchers can work at the cellular scale much more effectively, without damaging the cells and with the capability to observe cells from anywhere within the tissue.

Tissue engineering is definitely an exciting field – the ability to create living biological tissue in a lab could allow scientists to do things such as testing new drugs without the need for human subjects, or even to create patient-specific replacement organs or other body parts.

While some previous efforts have yielded finished products that were very small, a microfluidic device being developed at the University of Toronto can reportedly produce sections of precisely-engineered tissue that measure within the centimeters.