[goku12]

> and really hope it lasts until something like kidney cloning is a thing.

There was another technology under development, colloquially called the 'ghost heart' [1]. It uses a dead heart that's similar to a human's, most likely a pig's heart (I speculate that an unused human heart can also be used). They remove all the cells from the heart using a soap-like substance to obtain a ghostly white colored scaffolding of a heart (probably made of collagen). Then they use the recipient's own stem cells to grow heart muscles, blood vessels, etc on the scaffold. The process to get it to work like a human heart seems complicated, but doable. As you can guess, this heart is fully immunocompatible with the patient and doesn't require immunosuppressants like after a regular transplant. I imagine that this can eventually be replicated for any organ and that the improvement in the patient's quality of life it will bring is unthinkable in the current state of affairs. I'm not sure about the progress and current state of this technology, but several articles do turn up on searching.

[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2022/06/01/health/ghost-heart-life-i...

[hinkley]

Any time I haven’t heard about a tech for ten years I assume it didn’t work. I think I first heard of this stuff around ten years ago. At the time I think they were focused on kidneys. But those have a lot of complex plumbing.

As an outsider, who is either missing a mountain of context, or not so close to the problem they can’t see it, I would assume a better tack would be growing ghost arteries for bypasses and aneurism repair operations. Ghost intestines for reconstruction surgery for people with cancer or massive internal trauma. You’d have a simpler organ to reproduce, but in the artery case you’d likely have to also work turnaround time. Heart failure can be slow, but bypass surgery is often scheduled as either urgent or emergency (I just had a convo with a man who wasn’t allowed to leave the hospital after an angiogram showed he was one stairwell away from a fatal heart attack). But not having to harvest material from the thigh before surgery begins should shorten the surgery and reduce complications. You can have as much artery as you want for the surgery. You could have spares.

[goku12]

The article I cited is from 2022. At that time, the principal scientist had left the academia and was working to commercialize it. So I'm guessing it's still within your decade threshold? Besides, perhaps that threshold should be longer under the current circumstances. One of the greatest medical advancement of the recent times is the mRNA vaccine technology. But it's true origin is in the 1970s. They were solving numerous related problems in the meantime, though it could have been finished sooner had someone invested in it as intensely as they did during the pandemic.

[hinkley]

Looking at bibliographies, it seems like a lot of the research for decellularization was 2011, 2013, and a handful after. So they were still working on getting a clean substrate while working on how to fill it back in.

It’s a big problem, but still seems like they’re swinging for the fences when they could save people in the short term while working on organs.

[goku12]

Interesting! I just remembered that there is another team that's working on plant based scaffolds (cellulose scaffolds from leaves like spinach) [1]. This one is from 2017. So I'm guessing that the interest in the technology hasn't waned yet. I also wonder if any biocompatible scaffolds can be 3D printed, rather than having to decellularize the available ones.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/03/spinach-leaf-transfo...