1
00:00:10,143 --> 00:00:12,611
A team at Massachusetts General Hospital
2
00:00:12,679 --> 00:00:15,443
is working on growing an ear in a lab
3
00:00:15,515 --> 00:00:18,450
to help patients needing transplants.
4
00:00:18,518 --> 00:00:22,454
What we're looking at is our mouse
5
00:00:22,522 --> 00:00:26,856
with a half-sized human ear on its back.
6
00:00:26,926 --> 00:00:31,329
The ear that was grown in the lab is put
onto the back of a mouse.
7
00:00:33,433 --> 00:00:35,492
It does look a little bizarre.
8
00:00:35,568 --> 00:00:38,799
But, the whole purpose of this is to see
9
00:00:38,872 --> 00:00:41,534
if it maintains its shape,
10
00:00:41,608 --> 00:00:44,509
it maintains, um, its structure.
11
00:00:46,513 --> 00:00:51,883
It's our first step into essentially what we
would be putting into a human.
12
00:00:55,488 --> 00:00:58,048
These ears are the adult-sized ears,
13
00:00:58,124 --> 00:01:02,857
and these will be used for the next stage of
experimentation.
14
00:01:06,933 --> 00:01:09,663
The nice thing about engineering ears first,
15
00:01:09,736 --> 00:01:11,829
out of any other organ in the body,
16
00:01:11,905 --> 00:01:14,806
is that they don't require all of the blood vessels
17
00:01:14,874 --> 00:01:18,503
that the rest of the organs in the human
body require.
18
00:01:20,880 --> 00:01:26,375
So, therefore the ear is one of the easier
organs to start with.
19
00:01:26,453 --> 00:01:30,389
But from this man's point of view, ears are
not so simple.
20
00:01:30,457 --> 00:01:34,052
He is making the metal support structure for a scaffold.
21
00:01:34,127 --> 00:01:36,891
It is made of special wire.
22
00:01:38,832 --> 00:01:41,528
Ears have a complicated shape.
23
00:01:41,601 --> 00:01:45,560
So the first step is to create a shape that
looks real.
24
00:01:45,638 --> 00:01:49,836
Also, it's important to create the inner part
of the ear correctly
25
00:01:49,909 --> 00:01:52,844
so that hearing will be possible.
26
00:01:55,014 --> 00:01:58,506
This is a digital model of an ear.
27
00:01:58,585 --> 00:02:04,285
It is exactly the size and shape of a human
ear that the doctors need.
28
00:02:04,357 --> 00:02:07,258
Next, different types of living ear cells
29
00:02:07,327 --> 00:02:10,990
and food for the cells are added to the scaffold.
30
00:02:26,579 --> 00:02:30,948
Then the scaffold is put into a machine
called a bioreactor.
31
00:02:34,053 --> 00:02:38,649
The inside of the bioreactor is similar to the
human body.
32
00:02:38,725 --> 00:02:41,558
The ear cells will grow and survive here,
33
00:02:41,628 --> 00:02:44,722
like they were attached to a real human body.
34
00:02:46,599 --> 00:02:51,332
It takes approximately two weeks to grow a
living ear in the bioreactor.
35
00:02:55,909 --> 00:03:00,778
The ear grown in the lab is the first step to
human transplantation.