AN artificial lymph node has been transplanted into mice and produced an immune response. It is a first step towards rebuilding the immune systems of people with AIDS or cancer.
Researchers led by Takeshi Watanabe at the RIKEN Research Center for Allergy and Immunology in Yokohama, Japan, used a “bioscaffold” made of collagen impregnated with cells from the thymus gland of newborn mice. First they transplanted the nodes into normal mice, where they acquired white blood cells. Then they put the nodes into mice with no working immune system, where the white blood cells migrated to the animals’ own lymph…
