Lab-grown adrenal glands could help treat hormone-related conditions

Carissa Wong is a person.

Stem cells have been grown in the lab for the first time for the purpose of growing small human adrenals. Treatments for conditions in which these glands don't function properly could be improved by the achievement.

Our metabolism, our response to stress, and the production of sex hormones can all be traced back to the Adrenal glands.

There have been previous attempts to grow small versions of the glands from adult cells that have the potential to become almost any cell type.

The University of Pennsylvania's Kotaro Sasaki and his colleagues have grown cells from the blood of three people into the adrenal glands.

The lab-grown glands contained all the major cell types and features of a fetus. Fetal and lab-grown glands had the same pattern of activity in their genes. The stress-linked hormones cortisol and pregnenolone were produced by the lab-grown glands.

Sasaki says that there is a lot of the same hormones found in a fetus. Having an accurate model of how the adrenals develop will help us understand how we can treat conditions where people don't have important hormones.

It could also open the door to therapy where you grow a person's own cells into adrenal tissue that you implant back into the body, which could help with hormone related conditions.

The team spent three years establishing the cocktail of substances known as growth factors and chemicals that needed to be added.

Every three days we have to swap the mixture and adjust the ratio of the chemicals in the lab dish.

The first one to generate fetal adrenal cells from inducible pluripotent stem cells is what the study is about.

The technique can be used to develop cell-based treatments for conditions that involve the adrenal glands if they reach the postnatal stage.

The development time is being extended by Sasaki and his colleagues.

The journal's title is bioRxiv and it can be found in the journal's website.

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