Are "living" organ banks practical?
I was inspired by Dead Space which had cloned organ banks for transplants due to mining accidents. I honestly found this idea intriguing so what I'm wondering would it be practical or do better alternatives exist?
The "clone" would be a rapidly growing organism that takes the appearance of a bloated infant. The organisms have been cloned to not feel pain and if possible be virtually brain dead. All in all they would be basically a big sack of organs that, due to the human genetics used, takes the vague shape of an infant.
The process would be simple: a patient in need of an organ would either be put in cryo if it's a critical organ or simply wait a few days to weeks while the organ is being grown. Once the operation is complete, the rest of the organs are frozen and used for other transplants.
Would this be a practical/feasible organism or am I looking in the wrong direction?
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2 answers
Some yes, some no.
There are alternative pathways laid out below:
If you're going to grow a clone for replacement parts, you need stem cells.
These can be found in one of a few ways:
Day 2 or 3 after egg fertilization (prior to implantation and cell differentiation), a few cells would be shaved off and preserved. Unless you have some kind of nano-search tech, the egg will be hard to find and get at this stage. Would be tough to do now with a high failure rate of re-implantation.
The Placenta and umbilicus at birth. We can do this now.
The epithelial cells (ie cheek cells in the mouth taken by swab) taken from the adult. These will need to be specially treated to bring them back from cheek cells to stem cells (known as induced Pluripotency). We can do this now, the downside is that the cells would be old (think Dolly the sheep, dying of old age before her time). We are working on this and are confident of a manifest solution within a few years.
Then you have a few ways of growing the person/replacement organs.
Surrogacy, a human accepts an embryo, brings it to term. We can do this now — it takes 9 months, and the baby still has its full brain function. Lobotomy would be required and body maintenance. Presumably an option for the rich. The major organs would not be capable of sustaining adult life until at least two years after birth - kidney function of neonate is 14% of adult's, liver function even less than that, heart too small etc..
An artificial womb brings the embryo to term, the baby is disconnected and lobotomized. We can't do this, except to reproduce a few cells in a flask.
Genetic engineering to prevent higher functions from developing, Anencephaly is known, and life support could maybe be provided. We can't produce this condition yet and causes are disputed, give it a few years of research though.
A scaffold is made/printed (as per other answers, impregnated with appropriate growth factors) then colonized with cells. We can do this now with very simple structures - skin, blood vessels smooth muscle like bladder, single nerves (note: not nerve bundles). We're working on kidneys, pancreas, liver, these are decades away. Heart muscle presents its own problems regarding electrical waves that we've not solved yet.
So as the OP will see, the answer is some yes, some no. The OP is free to figure out how future research will find solutions.
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The impractical part is that you would need to grow an entire human being (or all the pieces of one in a single unit) just to get one organ.
A patient in need of an organ would either be put in cryo if it's a critical organ or simply wait a few days to weeks while the organ is being grown. Once the operation is complete the rest of the organs are frozen and used for other transplants.
Why grow an organ to order (requiring the patient to wait for days or weeks and possibly die or deteriorate..."cryo" is not foolproof) if you can just pull a ready-made organ out of the freezer instead?
If it's necessary to customize each organ, then who will use the extra frozen ones?
It doesn't make any sense. Either patients use "off the shelf" organs (with perhaps a waiting period for rare histologies) or everyone gets a custom one.
You'd be better off finding a way to grow single organs. Ethically it's a much better alternative (and probably easier than ensuring your "bloated baby" isn't a real person with rights). If not single organs, then perhaps organs in natural groups. Like heart and lungs or kidneys and bladder.
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