Creation of mini-organs follows mini-brains; teeny Frankensteins unlikely

(credit: Tyler Irving/Boyang Zhang/Kevin Soobrian)

To go along with mini thinking brain balls grown in lab, researchers have built functional, tiny organs as well-inching closer to the possibility of stitching together teeny-weeny Frankenstein monsters.

While the sci-fi-esque idea of full petri-dish people is just silliness (for now), miniaturized body parts could be highly useful for testing the safety and effectiveness of new drugs-perhaps someday replacing animal testing and some aspects of human trials, researchers speculate. And, in tests with prototypes of tiny, functional livers and hearts, researchers showed that the wee organs could successfully be implanted into living animals. The findings, reported in Nature Materials, suggest that the itsy-bitsy tissues could be used to repair full-sized organs some day, as well as for drug development.

While other lab-made mini organs have come before them, the new design offers a notable improvement to previous versions: vasculature and cell-to-cell connections.

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