Japanese Researchers Create a Pituitary Gland From Scratch in the Lab
Making a Mouse's Pituitary Gland from Scratch Rama via Wikimedia The thing about growing working organs in the lab is that the whole enterprise is completely mind-blowing. Yet we just keep doing it, and so we keep blowing minds. The latest: a team of researchers at Japan's RIKEN Center--the same group who earlier this year engineered a mouse retina that is the most complex tissue ever engineered--have now derived a working pituitary gland from mouse stem cells. That's saying something. For one, the pituitary gland is an integral part of the body's endocrine system. From it's position at the base of the brain it doles out key developmental hormones that instruct the body on how to grow and develop over time. But perhaps more importantly, the pituitary gland cannot itself develop without special chemical instructions from the hypothalamus (the brain region just above it). That's a serious bioengineering problem, because in order...