Researchers at Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences are making efforts to build human body parts for transplantation, Mehr News Agency reported.
Hossein Niknejad, head of the new technologies faculty, told the agency that the faculty is currently focused on the project of ‘building spare parts through tissue engineering’ in an attempt to build human spare parts such as kidneys, hearts, blood vessels, livers and skin.
“Currently 26,000 patients in Iran annually join the waiting list for a kidney transplant. Each year, this number has a 12-percent increase that makes the number of kidney donations very insufficient for meeting the need for this organ's transplant,” he said.
Noting that one of the difficulties in kidney transplant is its rejection from the host body after a few years, Niknejad maintained that building spare parts through tissue engineering is a way to resolve this problem.
“Iran is currently researching and conducting experiments in this area. The faculty of new technologies is working on the project to build an organ from the recipient’s cells,” he said.
“At present, the scaffolds for the spare parts are undergoing the production phase and we have made good progress in turning stem cells into kidney cells.”
Niknejad noted that the research had a good future prospect.
