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CINCINNATI, Jan. 4 (UPI) -- Researchers at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center have successfully tissue-engineered part of the human stomach to study disease. Scientists grew tissues from the stomach's corpus/fundus region in a petri dish, which are able to produce acid and digestive enzymes. Prior to this, the team was successful at growing tissue from the antrum, the stomach's hormone-producing region.
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"Now that we can grow both antral-and corpus/fundic-type human gastric mini-organs, it's possible to study how these human gastric tissues interact physiologically, respond differently to infection, injury and react to pharmacologic treatments," Jim Wells, Ph.D., principal investigator and director of the Pluripotent Stem Cell Facility at Cincinnati Children's Hospital, said in a press release.
"Diseases of the stomach impact millions of people in the United States, and gastric cancer is the third leading cause of cancer-related deaths worldwide."
The ability to engineer human stomach tissue in laboratory settings will allow researchers to study disease, model new treatments and understand human development in ways not possible before.
Wells and his team have been working for years in the development of human stomach tissue for study in laboratory settings. The team previously generated human intestine with an enteric nervous system able to absorb nutrients and show peristalsis, or intestinal muscular contractions that move food through the intestinal tract.
The main purpose of the research is to study how organs such as the esophagus, stomach, pancreas and intestines form during embryonic development. The research could be used to develop new treatments for genetic forms of diseases like monogenic diabetes or Hirschsprung's disease.
The next step is to study the ability of tissue-engineered human stomach organoids to model human gastric diseases by transplanting them into mouse models.
The study was published in Nature.
