08-16-2013, 12:46 AM
What’s good about getting urine from patients instead of blood is because it is, by far, much easier to take urine than to extract blood, especially those in the extremes of age.
There’s another interesting story about human pee. That is when the same country’s scientists grew artificial teeth from urine. Yes, teeth.
The tooth represents one of the best experimental models in organogenesis and is easily accessible for human replacement therapy, according to them, which is why it was an easy subject to manipulate.
Throughout the years, it has been animal bone, gold, and wood which are the sources of crafted false teeth. This time, the unlikely human urine gets unexpected medical attention.
Chinese scientists passed this research to the Cell Regeneration Journal on early May 2013, and it was then published just this June 30th. A team of about 15 researchers, based in Guangzhou Institutes of Biomedicine and Health, have been experimenting on urine stem cells and have successfully grown small tooth-like structures. It took them about 2 days to culture the cells before transplanting them to the mice’s subrenal capsule and then 3 weeks were observed for tooth regeneration.
Such teeth forms have similar physical properties to the real ones as well. These include the elastic modulus and some hardness characteristics. However, such false teeth are found to be just not as hard. The tests were done on laboratory mice and have not been tried on humans.
In spite of this new, and rather astonishing, discovery, such experiment received several other critiques as well.
One of them is from the University College of London, Professor Chris Mason who said to BBC news that human pee is a poor starting point and it is, “probably one of the worst sources (for stem cells). These are very few cells in the first place and the efficiency of turning them into stem cells is very low. You just wouldn’t do it in this way.”
Nevertheless, I believe there should be more studies like these. If brain cells can be made from urine stem cells, why not teeth?
There’s another interesting story about human pee. That is when the same country’s scientists grew artificial teeth from urine. Yes, teeth.
The tooth represents one of the best experimental models in organogenesis and is easily accessible for human replacement therapy, according to them, which is why it was an easy subject to manipulate.
Throughout the years, it has been animal bone, gold, and wood which are the sources of crafted false teeth. This time, the unlikely human urine gets unexpected medical attention.
Chinese scientists passed this research to the Cell Regeneration Journal on early May 2013, and it was then published just this June 30th. A team of about 15 researchers, based in Guangzhou Institutes of Biomedicine and Health, have been experimenting on urine stem cells and have successfully grown small tooth-like structures. It took them about 2 days to culture the cells before transplanting them to the mice’s subrenal capsule and then 3 weeks were observed for tooth regeneration.
Such teeth forms have similar physical properties to the real ones as well. These include the elastic modulus and some hardness characteristics. However, such false teeth are found to be just not as hard. The tests were done on laboratory mice and have not been tried on humans.
In spite of this new, and rather astonishing, discovery, such experiment received several other critiques as well.
One of them is from the University College of London, Professor Chris Mason who said to BBC news that human pee is a poor starting point and it is, “probably one of the worst sources (for stem cells). These are very few cells in the first place and the efficiency of turning them into stem cells is very low. You just wouldn’t do it in this way.”
Nevertheless, I believe there should be more studies like these. If brain cells can be made from urine stem cells, why not teeth?
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