Lab-grown gut pulses like the real thing

摘要

Gut tissue wired up with nerves has been grown in the lab and successfully grafted into mice for the first time. The achievement could improve our understanding of inflammatory bowel disease and Crohn's disease. "I feel this is one of the most complex tissues to have been engineered," says Jim Wells of Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center in Ohio. "It has the inner lining that does all the absorption of nutrients and secretion of digestive juices, fully functional muscles that propel the food through the gut, and nerves that control the pulsed muscle movement."