This latest discovery offers hope of a new approach to growing fat tissue for use in breast reconstruction or overall cosmetic surgery. It may further be important for curing type II diabetes.

Douglas Kniss, professor of obstetrics and gynecology and of biomedical engineering at Ohio State University, reported this in the current issue of the journal Tissue Engineering.

Along with Xihai Kang and Yubing Xie, both postdoctoral fellows in his laboratory, Kniss built a fabric-like carpet of polyethylene terephathalene (PET), or Dacron, fibers that served as scaffolding upon which new fat cells were grown.

The researchers then "seeded" that scaffolding with cells called pre-adipocytes cells that had begun their transformation from stem cells. "They just needed to be tweaked with a cocktail of hormones for them to evolve into fat cells," he said.

Kniss said that the transformation into bona fide fat cells took about two weeks to complete. At that point, the cells were able to absorb lipids a hallmark task of fat cells.

Researchers were able to extract RNA from the cells, just as they can from naturally occurring fat cells, and from that proved that the cells expressed the normally expected array of genes, and subsequent proteins and did so as well as occurs in normal tissue.
So far, the researchers have kept the cells alive and thriving for several months and hope to maintain them for up to a year.

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