Build-a-Bowel

There are a variety of serious intestinal diseases, including cancer and Crohn’s disease, that can result in a person needing large sections of their bowel to be surgically removed. In turn, this can lead to inadequate nutrient absorption and the need for intravenously delivered nutrition. Intestinal transplantation is an effective treatment for such patients, but like most organ transplants, demand greatly exceeds supply. To tackle the shortage, scientists are developing an alternative approach: growing human intestines in laboratories. The small bowel segment pictured, for example, was built using human stem cells induced to become intestinal epithelial cells (green) and vascular endothelial cells (red). These cells were then seeded onto a bowel scaffold – made from the structural matrix of a rat’s intestine. Such lab-built, human bowel sections have now been implanted into rats where they were shown to work like regular intestines – successfully transporting nutrients from the gut to the bloodstream.

Written by Ruth Williams

Ruth Williams

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Ruth is a freelance science journalist based in the US. She's a regular correspondent for The Scientist, and her work has appeared in The Lancet, Nature, Scientific American Mind, BBC Focus and elsewhere. Twitter @rooph

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• Image from work by Kentaro Kitano and Dana M. Schwartz, and colleagues
• Department of Surgery, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School
• Image originally published under a Creative Commons Licence (BY 4.0)
• Published in Nature Communications, October 2017