Brave new world of spare parts

Create a new you' has often been the slogan of beauty treatments and clothes designers. But science has caught up. Soon, the 'new you' will be for real.

Recent breakthroughs mean surgeons will be able to give you parts to replace those that previously, once broken, you usually had to do without. Some may be second-hand, such as an arm or even a penis from a dead person. Others are brand new and artificial, such as mechanical hearts and kidneys so close to human size and so reliable they function just like the real thing.

But the ultimate goal is replacing your failing heart with another one - a real one, made of human muscle; not the hard-to-come-by second-hand variety but a new, laboratory-grown version. And in 10 years, such an off-the-shelf, real human heart may be available.

Researchers in various countries including the United States, Canada, Britain and Australia have launched the Living Implants From Engineering initiative - to grow human organs, such as livers, kidneys and, ultimately, hearts, for transplant into people who need them.

The idea of a heart growing in a laboratory jar is not off the mark, said the project's leader, Professor Michael Sefton of the University of Toronto's Institute of Biomedical Engineering. However, he said: 'It might be a fancy jar, but yes, that could be the way it'll happen.' His vision, though, is of medical 'factories' making separate parts for the heart. 'We would imagine there would be several factories making the components, like valves, blood vessels . . . Then you would assemble them in a similar way to how cars are made.' He calls it a 'crazy idea', but the aim of the 10-year, $78 billion programme is deadly serious. The alternative, the 'second-hand' heart from a donor, nowhere near fills demand. In Hong Kong in May, only three of 20 people in need had received a heart and lung transplant.

For kidneys the situation was worse: 14 out of 950 patients had received kidney transplants, and of 100 people waiting for livers, five had received them. The failure rate can be high: one in five heart recipients in Britain die within a year.