News:Recently,Scientists has raised ethical concerns over growing of organoids in the laboratory that can perceive or feel things.
Facts:
About Organoids:
- Organoids are a group of cells grown in laboratories into a three dimensional, miniature structures that mimic the cell arrangement of a fully-grown organ.
- They are tiny typically the size of a pea organ-like structures that do not achieve all the functional maturity of human organs but often resemble the early stages of a developing tissue.
- Most organoids contain only a subset of all the cells seen in a real organ, but lack blood vessels to make them fully functional.
How are organoids grown in the laboratory?
- Organoids are grown in the lab using stem cells that can become any of the specialised cells seen in the human body.
- They could be grown from stem cells taken from the organ or adults cells that have been induced to behave like stem cells, scientifically called induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC).
- Stem cells are provided with nutrients and other specific molecules to grow and become cells resembling a specific organ.
- The growing cells are capable of self-organising into cellular structures of a specific organ and can partly replicate complex functions of mature organs
Importance of Organoids:
- Organoids offer new opportunities to study proteins and genes that are critical for the development of an organ.This helps in knowing how a mutation in a specific gene causes a disease or disorder.
- Organoids represents all components of organ and are suited to study infectious diseases affecting specialized human cell types.
- Organoids can be used to study the safety and efficacy of new drugs and also test the response of tissues to existing medicines.
- Organoids will bring precision medicine closer to reality by developing patient-specific treatment strategies by studying which drugs the patient is most sensitive to.
Concerns:
- Experts have said that Scientists have transplanted lab-grown brain organoid to adult animals.This is seen as a step towards potential humanisation of host animals.
- They have also argued that brain organoids developed do not have the necessary sensory inputs and sensory connections compared to the Human brain.
