cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/39850196
It involves removing a patient’s tooth, usually the canine, installing a plastic optical lens inside it, and then implanting the whole thing into the eye.
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/39850196
It involves removing a patient’s tooth, usually the canine, installing a plastic optical lens inside it, and then implanting the whole thing into the eye.
Interesting! I wonder if it is already technically feasible to culture tooth-like pieces from the patient’s stem cells. Instead of extracting and carving a tooth, it would be cool to grow the tissue in some kind of structured 3D matrix. Patient gets to keep their canine then.
That said… Do you know if tissue grown from a patient’s own stem cells is generally not rejected by the immune system? I am not sure if cells need to differentiate within the body to get labeled by some molecular markers that make them immunocompatible, or if having the same genetic makeup is good enough.
That’s a good point. I remember seeing an article about tooth re-growing teeth (in ferrets), and while I don’t remember if it was stem cells, that might be nicer than having to lose a tooth for an eye.
My background is a bit limited here, but looking around it seems that it’s ‘better’ but not necessarily ‘rejection proof’
HSCT came to mind first, but those are replicated inside the patient:
Induced pluripotent stem cells seem closer:
This other article from 2013 lists a few concerns, and I think this is the closest to what you were looking for: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3931018/#sec3
Potential Causes of iPSC Immunogenicity
A fun fact I came across on that wikipedia article:
Thanks a lot for looking into this!
I am not super familiar with the topic, but I have been told of some successful animal studies on implanting the organoid tissue into the animals from which the stem cells were derived.
Yeah, that covers nicely what I was wondering about. Especially the reason 1 (embryonic proteins not present during immune system education) and reason 2 (epigenetic changes). I can appreciate that these mechanisms might possibly cause issues, but I would be curious to learn the actual magnitude of their impact.
Oooh, that’s why! I do think iPSC looks nicer than IPSC. Not a big apple fan, though