Before a drug can be approved as safe for human use by the FDA, it has to undergo rigorous testing to ensure its safety. Unfortunately, there are many drugs that seem safe in trials but are then recalled when they are found to cause damage to the liver. Nearly every drug that we take ends up passing through the liver since it is the body’s natural toxin filter, but the testing resources available to drug companies aren’t as effective as they should be. Now, Organovo’s mini 3D printed livers could change that and remove some of the risk of new medications.

Organovo has been printing real human livers – albeit on an itty-bitty scale – since 2013. These exVive3D, as Organovo calls them, are now available for sale to pharmaceutical companies for drug trials. They are roughly hexagonal in shape and consist of of primary human hepatocytes, stellate, and endothelial cell types, which are all found in natural human livers. The mini-organs are stable for at least 42 days, as compared to the 48-hour active lifespan of industry-standard 2D liver cell testing systems.

This is a giant leap forward in drug testing and the creation of safer medicines. Until now, drugs have been tested on lab rats and on tiny single layers of liver cells in the lab, but those tests can’t always predict how the drugs will interact with actual living human livers. Organovo used the exVive3D “livers” to test a drug which had initially been approved by the FDA but later recalled because it was found to cause liver damage. The drug had passed the original traditional drug trials, but the Organovo models detected that it would cause liver damage. Going forward, using these tiny 3D printed livers could – and should, in our opinion – become industry standard for drug testing. Switching over to actual 3D printed organs for drug testing could dramatically reduce drug recalls and associated adverse health effects.

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There are animal people, and then there are people who will go above and beyond to give everything they have to help an animal in need. Kitty Martin is an above-and-beyond kind of person. She found a young calf frozen to a field in Virginia, nearly starved to death with its hind hooves lost to frostbite. The retired truck driver jumped into action, calling animal hospitals all over the country to find help for the little calf she named Hero.

Hero’s fate was uncertain for a while. He was so badly injured that his veterinary team at first thought it would be best to euthanize him. But Hero lived up to his name and regained enough health to receive his first pair of prosthetic legs. The company that made Hero’s new legs had never made bovine replacement legs before, so they studied cows’ natural gaits to see if they could reproduce those movements biomechanically.

It took a while for Hero to get used to his new legs. He was wobbly and unsure at first, but eventually learned to use them almost as effectively as a set of natural legs. Watching the growing cow totter around on his prosthetic legs is precious and heartbreaking all at once. Since receiving his first pair of legs, Hero has outgrown the prostheses and received a new, larger pair.

Although Martin rescued Hero and spent nearly $40,000 on his new legs, she doesn’t plan to make him a house pet. Hero is going to live on a farm in Texas where she can visit him regularly. According to this all-star animal lover, she would like to see Hero work with human amputees as a source of inspiration and companionship.

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With any long-term medication, it’s very important to make sure that the drug maintains a steady level in the patient’s bloodstream. That’s difficult to do without weekly or even daily trips to a doctor’s office. A device called MEDIC (Microfluidic Electrochemical Detector for In vivo Concentrations) developed at UC Santa Barbara could keep track of medication concentration in real time.

According to the team behind the project, current dosing methods are primitive and mostly based on educated guesses, taking into account the patient’s weight or age. They don’t, however, consider a patient’s metabolism, diet, or other medications. The MEDIC implant is just a little larger than a jumbo paperclip and contains a gold-lined microfluidics chamber. Artificial DNA strands called aptamers extend from the chamber.

The aptamers catch the target molecules and send a little jolt of current to the MEDIC device, signaling the presence of the molecule in the blood. The method allows doctors to see how the drug is metabolizing in a patient’s body, which is a vital part of ensuring the efficacy of the treatment and the health of the patient. The device is in its early stages and still needs to undergo plenty of testing before it’s approved for use – but it’s promising, and the technology can adapt in future iterations to help control biological systems that need constant monitoring and intervention.

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Is the gastric-brooding frog the Second Coming? A team of Australian biologists has resurrected a long-extinct species of frog which may have the most unusual egg hatching habits in the animal world. Thanks to the efforts of the scientists working with the Lazarus Project, the resurrected frog may eventually ascend to sit upon the right hand of a scientist.

Researchers at the University of Newcastle in Australia have recently taken DNA from a preserved mouth-brooding frog in an attempt to resurrect the little guy from complete extinction. After being judged by habitat loss and persecuted by a council of parasites, fungus and invasive weeds, the frog was condemned to extinction in the 1980’s. The researchers involved, working with the Lazarus Project, neutralized eggs from a distant relative, the great-barred frog, and inserted into them the nuclei of the mouth-brooding frog. This was done using a system called somatic cell nuclear transfer.

A few of the eggs miraculously split and expanded to the embryonic stage. Although none of these embryos made it through a couple days, subsequent testing showed absolute proof that the little life forms did contain genetic material from the defunct species.

“We’re increasingly confident that the hurdles ahead are technological and not biological and that we will succeed,” said Professor Mike Archer of the University of New South Wales in Sydney. “Importantly, we’ve demonstrated already the great promise this technology has as a conservation tool when hundreds of the world’s amphibian species are in catastrophic decline.”

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As if the world needed any further proof that bacon is made of miracles, a US Marine recently re-grew a missing part of his leg thanks to an injection of hormone extracted from pigs. Marine Isaias Hernandez was repairing a truck in Afghanistan when a nearby explosion caused extensive damage to his right leg, claiming more than 70 percent of his right thigh muscles. By anyone’s (conventional) measure, damage like this should have resulted in amputation. But Hernandez was instead given a revolutionary new treatment that allowed him to regenerate the missing part of his limb.

Medical science has long been striving to make human limb regeneration possible. Many other animals regrow lost limbs, and even human fetuses can regrow damaged parts in the womb. But until now, this amazing feat has eluded us. The treatment used in this case involves injecting the patient with a growth-stimulating hormone extracted from pig bladders. Before the treatment could begin, Corporal Hernandez had to build up the remaining 30 percent of muscle on his injured leg. Then his leg was cut open and surgeons inserted a small piece of extracellular matrix, a component of body tissue that is like cellular scaffolding.

Corporal Hernandez was able to regain nearly all of the strength in his wounded leg following the operation. But this wasn’t a case of simply regrowing a chunk of lost tissue; Hernandez regrew skeletal muscle, a striated muscle type that typically does not grow back after traumatic injuries. His recovery was thanks to a $70 million research project conducted by the US military to explore regenerative medicine. The research will not only benefit injured soldiers, but anyone facing limb amputation in the future.

The post Porcine Miracle: Pig Extract Helps Marine Regrow Lost Leg first appeared on Gajitz.