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Growing, printing, and replacing the parts that wear out — organs, tissue, limbs, blood — and why vascularization is still the wall.
31 of 31 shown
Engineered adeno-associated viruses used to carry therapeutic genes into human cells, the workhorse of in vivo gene therapy and the source of most of its limits.
Engineered substitutes for the oxygen-carrying function of blood, including haemoglobin carriers, perfluorocarbon emulsions and cultured red cells, none in general clinical use.
Mechanical devices that take over some or all of the heart's pumping function, from routine ventricular assist pumps to total replacements used mainly as a bridge to transplant.
A device that sustains fetal development outside a body by perfusing the umbilical circulation while the fetus remains immersed in fluid, tested so far only in animals.
An implanted device that restores a functional sense of hearing by stimulating the auditory nerve with electrical pulses, bypassing the ear's damaged hair cells.
The practice of preserving legally dead people at cryogenic temperatures in the hope that future medicine can repair and revive them.
Donor tissues stripped of their cells to leave an extracellular matrix scaffold, used as surgical implants and as a route to rebuilding whole organs from a preserved vascular tree.
The proposed transfer of a living human head onto a donor body, blocked chiefly by the inability to reconnect a severed spinal cord and rejected by mainstream neurosurgery.
Computational models of an individual person's physiology, built from that person's own data and run to predict what an intervention would do before it is attempted.
The proposal to induce a hibernation-like state of suppressed metabolism in people, and the distance between rodent torpor circuits and any clinical human application.
The age-related remodelling of the immune system, in which responses to unfamiliar antigens weaken while chronic activation against familiar ones persists.
Adult cells reprogrammed back to an embryonic-like state, capable of becoming any cell type in the body and of being derived from a specific patient.
The attempt to produce whole transplantable organs from cells rather than donors, currently limited to simple tissues, islet clusters and organs grown inside host animals.
The regrowth of an amputated limb from the stump, routine in salamanders and absent in mammals, and the biology that separates the two.
Micrometre- to millimetre-scale devices steered through the body by external magnetic, acoustic, or biological means, demonstrated in animals and used clinically only as capsule endoscopes.
The set of physiological and neural changes by which the human body reorganises itself for weightlessness, and the countermeasures that limit the cost of returning.
Externally powered artificial limbs controlled by electrical activity recorded from the wearer's residual muscles, the dominant design for powered upper-limb prostheses.
Blockade of the growth factor myostatin to increase skeletal muscle mass, an effect reproduced across species that has repeatedly failed to translate into functional benefit in humans.
The engineering field that builds devices interfacing directly with the nervous system to restore lost sensory, motor, cognitive, or autonomic function.
The additive manufacture of living tissue by depositing cells and biomaterials in a programmed pattern, pursued as a route to transplantable organs but limited so far to simple structures.
The persistent gap between the number of people who need a transplant and the number of usable donated organs, which drives most work on engineered and animal-derived replacements.
Self-organizing tissue cultures grown from stem cells that reproduce some of the architecture and function of an organ, used mainly for disease modelling rather than transplantation.
The direct structural fusion of living bone to a titanium implant, the biological principle underlying dental implants and skeletally anchored limb prostheses.
Wearable powered frames that apply force in parallel with the wearer's own limbs, used for gait rehabilitation, industrial load support, and proposed strength augmentation.
Genetic modification of a living person's body cells to treat disease, producing a change that is not passed on to their children.
The medical discipline concerned with how spaceflight alters human physiology and with keeping crews functional in an environment the body did not evolve for.
The age-related decline in the number and regenerative function of adult stem cells across blood, muscle, gut and skin, and the loss of repair capacity that follows.
The construction of living tissue from cells, scaffolds and signalling molecules, a field with approved products for skin and cartilage but no solid organ after three decades.
A temporary transplant of a donated uterus that lets a woman without a working one carry a pregnancy, then is removed so that immunosuppression can stop.
Sub-millimetre motile constructs assembled from frog embryonic cells and shaped by an evolutionary algorithm, classed as neither robots nor organisms in any settled sense.
The transplantation of organs between species, now pursued with genetically engineered pigs whose antigens and clotting proteins have been altered to survive in a human recipient.