Health Issue: Replacement 'Scaffolds"

Body part damaged? Doc can get one off the shelf Replacement 'Scaffolds' To Act As Frame for Cells To Grow on London: surgeons could soon use readymade human body parts to repair injuries or patch up worn out organs of patients, experts say.           They are perfecting in developing bare "scaffold building blocks" of body parts which, they said, could be used as a frame for a patient's own cells to grow around. Experts said the scaffold for the most commonly used parts could be created in advance and stored ready for use when needed, the Telegraph reported.          The technique, which has already been successful in creating a new section of windpipe for patients, involves taking a piece of dead donor or animal body part and removing all the soft tissue so just the bare structure is left. Then, stem cells from the patie4nt can then be placed on the frame and will regrow into a new body part for them, according to the scientists.         John fisher from the University of Leeds said banks of scaffolds of all kinds of body tissue can be created to facilitalte doctors in transplants. Speaking at the UK National Stem Cell Network Annual Science Meeting in Nottingham, Fisher said, "If you take a natural tissue and strip off all of the donor's cells you're left with a biological scaffold made mostly of a protein called collagen, which is compatible with the patient receiving the scaffold.         "That scaffold is good from an engineering perspective because it's strong, flexible and retains the properties of the natural tissue. It also has the appropriate shape and size, and from a biological perspective is good because a patient's cells can bind to it and repopulate it easily."          The advantage of the method is that the patient will not reject the transplanted tissue as foreign as the scaffold is stripped of all material that can trigger rejection and the soft tissue is grown from their own stem cells. It means patients can avoid poserful immunosurpressant drugs which shorten life expectancy and can increase cancer risk.