A team, led by Prof Alexander Seifalian of the Department of Nanotechnology and Regenerative Medicine in University College, London, claims it's actually focusing on growing replacement organs and body parts to order, using a patient's own cells.

6 May 2012
'This is a nose we’re growing for a patient next month,’ Professor Alexander Seifalian says matter-of-factly, plucking a Petri dish from the bench beside him.

Inside is an utterly lifelike appendage, swimming in red goo. Alongside it is another dish containing an ear.

‘It’s a world first,’ he says smiling.

‘Nobody has ever grown a nose before.’

His lab is little more than a series of worn wooden desktops strewn with beakers, solutions, taps, medical jars, tubing and paperwork, and looks like a school chemistry lab.

But it’s from here that Seifalian leads University College London’s (UCL) Department of Nanotechnology and Regenerative Medicine, which he jokingly calls the ‘human body parts store’. 

 As he takes me on a tour of his lab I’m bombarded with one medical breakthrough after another.

At one desk he picks up a glass mould that shaped the trachea – windpipe – used in the world’s first synthetic organ transplant.

At another are the ingredients for the revolutionary nanomaterial at the heart of his creations, and just beyond that is a large machine with a pale, gossamer-thin cable inside that’s pulsing with what looks like a heartbeat. It’s an artery.

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