My day job can be kind of gross: I’m trying to develop decellularized tissue scaffolds that can be used to make bioartificial tissues. Let’s break up “decellularized”: “de-“ means to remove, and “cellularized” refers to the basic building blocks of tissue structures.

We have a process through which we can remove these cells, leaving behind scaffolding material upon which we can grow bioartificial tissues. Think of it as moving out of your apartment: You’ll take all your furniture, but you won’t take the walls with you.

We’re not just doing this for fun. (It’s fun for me – I quite enjoy it.) These decellularized scaffolds can be used in beneficial ways, particularly as scaffolds for transplantable organs and as supercapacitors. Do you know how big a camel’s brain and internal organs are? You could fit a lot of energy in there.

I mention camels because we’re not generating these tissues from humans. Instead, my team has turned to the idea of repurposing slaughterhouse waste. In the UAE, at least, most of the animals going to slaughter are cows, sheep, goats and camels.

Peter R. Corridon

 

Using slaughterhouse waste to create value-added products is not a new idea: Plenty of research has investigated making biomaterials, fertilizers, biogas and feeds, but we’re among the first to consider using this agro-food waste for xenotransplantation and energy-extraction models. We’re not suggesting direct transplantation (you don’t want sheep eyes or kidneys, and a camel brain wouldn’t fit in your skull) but rather breaking these organs down to their scaffolds and building patient-specific human tissues on top.

Slaughterhouses produce billions of tons of waste that must be discarded or recycled, often at considerable cost. Turning some of this waste into bioartificial tissues and organs can create the basis for industrial-scale efforts that drive circular bioeconomic sustainability and support health-care needs at the same time. There are many more people waiting for organ transplants than there are organs to go around.

I’m not saying it’s easy to make transplantable organs from animal bits and pieces. There’s a lot to consider, from mimicking native tissue structures to biocompatibility to graft integrity to ethical considerations. But theoretically, I should be able to decellularize a camel kidney, take some of your stem cells, and grow functional kidney units just for you on that camel scaffold that your body could potentially accept, given advances in gene-editing technologies like CRISPR. We’re still working on it.

The other thing we’re working on is the idea of organ battery packs.

It was a bit misleading of me to suggest camel brains for battery storage — we actually use the bones. Maybe the camel skull would have been more accurate.

Supercapacitors have significantly higher capacities than traditional battery systems as well as rapid charge-discharge rates, and low internal resistances. They make great energy-storage systems, particularly in implantable medical devices. Think pacemakers or smart implants.

Supercapacitor structures are made of porous carbon materials due to their high surface areas, availability, electrical conductivity and low costs. We can make these carbon materials from agri-food biowaste products. Animal bone residue makes excellent electrodes, and using these slaughterhouse leftovers could constitute a renewable carbon source, if not a vegan one.

But for as long as people around the world eat meat, there will be slaughterhouse waste. Our research is using this in a positive way, using each part of the animal. Nothing need go to waste.

Peter R. Corridon is a member of Khalifa University’s Department of Biomedical Engineering and Biotechnology and has a Ph.D. in medical biophysics and biomolecular imaging from Indiana University School of Medicine.