Here’s a piece of Olympic paraphernalia that is sure to make collectors drool: an Olympic ring logo made of nerve cells.
Coined the “Living Rings,” the logo was made by scientists at the Keck Center for Tissue Engineering, a bioengineering laboratory at the U. The logo is made of mouse nerve cells and measures one-eighth inch in length.
Patrick Tresco, associate professor of bioengineering, came up with the idea back in December to impress Gov. Mike Leavitt, who was planning to visit the center.
“We want to show him what we can do,” Tresco said. “It combines tissue engineering and biology know-how.”
Directed by a template made with a photolithographic process, a technique used in making computer chips, mouse nerve cells grew around the interlocking rings. The effort took about two weeks without the need to develop any new techniques.
“We knew we could do it. It wasn’t a technical surprise,” Tresco said.
The staining process, which increases the visibility of the cells, killed the cells within four days. So, the Living Ring is not living anymore.
Although it was for demonstration purposes only, the ring illustrates the technology that may lead to repairing damages to the nervous system. Biodegradable scaffolding can be used to direct nerve growth to bridge a severed spinal cord, for example, but Tresco concedes that is at least a decade and “considerable capital investment” away.
“It’s one thing to get nerve cells to grow in a dish like this,” Tresco said. “It is orders of magnitude more difficult to have this occur in a damaged nervous system.”