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Lockdowns across the globe, which were imposed to curb the spread of COVID-19, had the unexpected side-effect of inspiring a new wave of amateur bakers. At the peak of the crisis, spending a couple of minutes on social media would quickly reveal the latest #bakersofinstagram trend, as the bored and the housebound showcased their latest banana bread, sourdough, or focaccia.
Google confirmed that worldwide baking-related searches surged between March and April 2020, as did demand for key baking ingredients such as flour. In March, sales of yeast in the U.S. grew by 647% and in April, banana bread was the most searched-for recipe across the whole country. CNN even went so far as to brand the sweet bread as the “unofficial snack of the coronavirus pandemic.”
But bread-baking has not only served as a comforting hobby at a distressing time. One group of scientists, spurred by all the pandemic baking, is using bread as a scaffold for lab-grown human cells.
How does a scaffold support the growth of human cells?
In recent years, researchers have pursued a solution to growing living tissues and organs outside of human and animal bodies. The process sees a scaffold (often made from the protein collagen) being seeded with cells which will grow and multiply under the right conditions.
In 2013, for example, the world’s first lab-grown burger was cooked and served on live television and today there are dozens of organizations working to produce cell-based meat. Last December, the Singapore Food Agency approved the sale of cultured chicken meat and the restaurant 1880 became the first in the world to serve lab-grown chicken dishes to its customers. Lab-grown meat is more sustainable, cruelty-free, antibiotic-free, and capable of preventing future pandemics.
In a medical setting, tissue engineering could restore, maintain, or improve damaged tissues. To date, the FDA has approved the production of artificial skin and cartilage.
One team has developed a flea-sized, Lego-inspired, 3D-printed brick that serves as a scaffold to grow hard and soft tissue and could eventually be used to grow organs for human transplant. In other cases, existing cells from a donor organ or other human tissue can be used as a scaffold to grow new cells. This could prove particularly useful in the process of customizing organs to prevent rejection by a patient’s immune system.
Although promising many benefits, the process of growing cells in a lab environment is expensive, slow, and difficult to scale. But a team of tissue engineers believes their Irish soda bread scaffold could address these challenges.
How could Irish soda bread be used to grow human cells?
In the process of developing this new kind of scaffold, scientists at the University of Ottawa trialed various types of bread, including gluten-free recipes. While some of their creations turned out much soggier than others, they ultimately succeeded with Irish soda bread, which uses sodium bicarbonate content as a leavening agent instead of yeast.
Speaking with New Scientist, Andrew Pelling, the lead researcher on the project, said, “It seemed like a fitting project for these times.”
To create the scaffold, the bread was baked, sterilized with alcohol, and then chemically treated to strengthen its structure. The team’s experiments revealed that human muscle, skin, and bone cells could cling to the scaffold and multiply. The bread was capable of maintaining its structure for up to two weeks.
What does the future hold for bread-based scaffolds?
It’s too early to say whether or not the bread-grown human cells will be viable in a medical setting, but researchers believe their solution is scalable.
If proven successful, replacing commonly-used synthetic or animal-based scaffold with Pelling’s bread alternative could significantly reduce the costs of medical treatments and the enormous expense of lab-grown meat.
Image Credit: Sokor Space / Shutterstock.com
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