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| a cheat in progress? |
Yesterday's post was on growing your own gut.
Now - why would you want to grow your own gut?
As it turns out, growing your own gut - or to be more correct, growing gut organoids - is a good thing for drug and disease research. The little gut-lets grown in vitro are great substitutes for real guts, letting researchers avoid the great lab rodent sacrifice and simultaneously giving them access to a patient's individual enteric peculiarities. By banking loads of individual gut explants for organoid culture, more research can be done to unravel the links between genomics and disease, which is a first step in providing individualized, tailored therapies for conditions such as cancer.
Imagine being able to grow your own test piece of gut in a dish and using it to test for drugs that will be effective just for you!
Magic, and not that far off.