Skip to main content

Lab-grown stomach gets scientists one step closer to a ‘human on a chip’

stomach grown in a lab 54024670 l
Catalin205/123RF
More people are affected by stomach diseases than heart disease. While in most cases this is in relatively minor ways, such as overproduction of acid or gastritis, in a growing number of instances it’s linked with gastric cancer — which affects around 26,370 people a year in the United States alone.

To find out more about stomachs and the effect of bacteria such as helicobacter pylori, researchers at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center created a “Petri dish stomach,” complete with the ability to produce acid and digestive enzymes.

“What my lab has been doing for over a decade is trying to generate human organ tissues in a Petri dish,” Dr. James Wells, lead investigator, told Digital Trends. “Organ tissues represent a really good way of investigating human disease on a level that you can’t do by studying patients.”

The work, published in the journal Nature, describes how a functioning “organoid” model of a mini stomach can be grown from pluripotent stem cells, which can be grown into any tissue in a person. By “growing” a stomach, researchers get to watch how exactly diseases affect that particular part of the body — from what happens when too much acid builds up to how certain experimental drugs are able to help deal with inflammation.

A lab-grown piece of the human stomach, as seen under a microscope. Image used with permission by copyright holder

“We turn the stem cells into something which is effectively a functioning mini-stomach,” Wells continued. “It’s only a few millimeters in size, but it can produce acid, digestive enzymes, and respond to the cues that trigger your stomach to respond in different ways. In other words, while they are small, [Petri dish stomachs] have the same physiological properties as an actual stomach.”

The eventual goal, he said, is to develop a “human on a chip,” which would take the form of a credit card-sized device containing similar organoids for every organ in the human body. Eventually, these could be used to help treat patients.

“Organs that have to be removed because of damage or disease are very hard to replace, outside of organ donors, who there are a real shortage of,” he said. “In the future, we think it should be possible to scale up these mini organs into something that is a therapeutic transplant. That is the direction we’re headed in.”

Editors' Recommendations

Luke Dormehl
I'm a UK-based tech writer covering Cool Tech at Digital Trends. I've also written for Fast Company, Wired, the Guardian…
Immune cell discovery takes us one step closer to a universal flu vaccine
coldsense app from zicam sickweather flu

The effects of the flu virus can range from debilitating to deadly. That makes all the more welcome news that a group of international researchers has made a discovery which could take us one step closer to the universal, one-shot flu vaccine that people around the world have been dreaming of.

“Our work focuses on the development of a universal influenza vaccine: one that would not require annual reformulation,” Marios Koutsakos, a researcher at the University of Melbourne's Doherty Institute, told Digital Trends. “Our publication in Nature Immunology this week demonstrates that a subset of white blood cells called ‘killer’ T cells can provide immunity across all the different types of influenza viruses that can infect humans. ... This is a very exciting and novel finding as it provides us with new insights on how to go about designing a universal influenza vaccine. In essence, we have identified the parts of influenza viruses that are common across all strains, and to which the killer T cells can respond, too.”

Read more
We’re another step closer to made-to-order human kidneys
Kidney transplant waiting list dialysis surgery

There’s a chronic shortage of available transplant organs, which leads to the unnecessary death of thousands of people each year. To help alleviate this situation, medical researchers and scientists are working hard to find other ways of sourcing human-compatible organs, whether by bio-printing them in a lab or figuring out ways to repurpose organs from other animals.

While there is still a ways to go for both these approaches, researchers from Japan’s National Institute for Physiological Sciences recently made a breakthrough, which could have enormous implications for future kidney transplants. In a pioneering study, they demonstrated that it is possible to grow functional mouse kidneys inside rats using donor stem cells. Initial attempts to do this had failed, since rat stem cells don’t differentiate into the two main cell types required for forming kidneys. However, the researchers got around this by injecting mouse stem cells into rat blastocysts, the cell clusters formed after an egg is fertilized. When these were implanted into developing rats, they grew into normal fetuses, but containing a pair of mouse-derived kidneys. All of these kidneys were intact and more than half were capable of producing urine.

Read more
Johns Hopkins’ lab-grown human retina could lead to big insights
eye tracking reader help human

Human Retinas Grown in a Dish

Scientists from Johns Hopkins University have successfully grown human retina tissue from scratch in a lab. The work could help with the development of new therapeutics related to eye diseases. These lab-grown retinal cells won’t be used for transplants, however. Instead, they are being used by researchers to gain a better understanding of the way in which the color-detecting cells in the eye function.

Read more