![]() Photo: Andrew Pelling.Īpples? Apples grow on trees. Ears carved into apple cellulose impregnated with living human cells. “The equivalent amount of synthetic commercial biomaterial needed to create an organ can sometimes cost thousands of dollars on the market,” Pelling says. Scientists have also spent decades trying to engineer synthetic scaffolds so that blood vessels will grow inside of them. “The jury is still out on whether it will actually work with an organ like the heart,” says Pelling. ![]() (In a heart, what’s left behind when a donor’s cells are stripped out looks like a white ‘ ghost heart,’ and is primarily made of collagen.) It can be a fiendishly complicated process, and so far scientists have only seen success with simpler organs such as bladders. In this case, scientists would remove the donor’s cells from the tissue, use what’s left behind as the protein scaffold, repopulate it with the patient’s stem cells and then transplant the organ back into the patient. There are several approaches for creating these scaffolds, but one promising approach uses the existing scaffold of a donated organ. “The common wisdom has been that scaffolds should be as native to the human body as possible,” says Pelling. But all of them need a base material that can host living cells. Here’s how scientists are trying to make replacement body parts now. Lab-grown organs are at the frontier of medicine, with scientists experimenting with growing bone, cartilage, even more complex organs like kidneys and hearts. And why is that important? Because it suggests the possibility of a low-cost, globally accessible biomaterial with which we might reconstruct our falling-apart bodies: skin, bones, veins, organs and so on. This may sound like just a creepy science art project, but it demonstrates an important point: that human cells can thrive on the fibrous structures of plants. The ears were carved into the cellulose by hand (by Pelling’s wife, as it happens). Think topiary. Yes, the ears are made up of real, living human cells, but the material that gives them structure - the scaffolding - is apple cellulose. ![]() Are they real human ears? Can they … hear? The answer is complex. But how do you do that - and more importantly, why would you want to? The answer is surprisingly simple, and could mean greater access to medical innovation and well-being for all. In his lab at the University of Ottawa, he’s even figured out how to use apples and human cells to make ears in a petri dish. Biohacker and TED Fellow Andrew Pelling creates living, functional biological objects that don’t exist in nature - without deliberately modifying DNA in any way.
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