NH Business: Science on Tap: Beer, burgers and body parts

Feb. 11—NICHOLAS RINELLA remembers repairing lawnmower engines with his grandfather, which sometimes required replacing broken parts.

Someday we may be able to fix humans the same way, thanks to work Rinella and his colleagues are doing at the Advanced Regenerative Manufacturing Institute in Manchester.

OK, so it's a bit more complicated to grow a kidney for an ailing person than to install a new carburetor on a sputtering push mower, but reducing that complexity is the goal as ARMI develops methods to mass produce human cells and tissues.

Transplanting human organs was one of the biggest medical breakthroughs of the 20th century, Rinella told about 60 people gathered Tuesday at Stark Tavern for a Science on Tap talk.

But organ transplants have many limitations, including the body's impulse to reject them, which requires recipients to take immunosuppressant drugs for the rest of their lives, leaving them vulnerable to infections.

"Our immune system plays a huge role in fighting pre-cancerous cells," said Rinella, a process development scientist at ARMI, the nonprofit collective based in the Millyard launched by inventor Dean Kamen in 2017.

ARMI was seeded with $80 million from the U.S. Department of Defense. The project is a collaboration between biotech companies, research institutions, government agencies and other partners, who pledged $214 million worth of additional support.

Rinella previously worked as a laboratory supervisor for the microbiology team at Kamen's DEKA Research and Development Corp. on a hemodialysis machine.

Heady stuff for a talk over beer and burgers at a local bar. The Science on Tap series, a SEE Science Center program now in its 10th year, has high geek appeal.

Rinella's opening monologue only lasted about five minutes before he opened the floor to the audience.

He fielded one question — about whether there is research underway to modify the proteins that trigger an immune response — with a question of his own.

"I am so glad somebody asked this question," Rinella said. "Are there any nerds out there who have heard of the major histocompatibility complex?"

Only one person raised his hand, but he was a ringer. Dr. Richard McFarland, an FDA veteran, serves as ARMI's chief regulatory officer.

Everyone else just laughed.

I consulted my phone for the answer. Here's what Wikipedia said:

"The major histocompatibility complex (MHC) is a large locus on the vertebrate DNA containing a set of closely linked polymorphic genes that code for cell surface proteins essential for the adaptive immune system."

Something you need to know if you're going to try to grow human cells in a clean lab.

"The MHC, that very long scientific word I just said, is our immune system's main method for detecting the presence of foreign bodies," Rinella said.

He recalled the first successful transplant of a genetically modified pig's heart into a 57-year-old man in 2022 by doctors at the University of Maryland Medical Center. The man died six months later, but doctors said it was from other factors, not because his body rejected the organ.

"Why did things not go wrong? We are putting an animal organ inside of a human. Why didn't they kill him immediately?" Rinella said. "The simple answer is because they genetically modified, they genetically engineered, all of the cells inside of that pig so that it did not produce one of the major surface proteins, antigens ... that stimulate the immune system."

That process could play a part in ARMI's work.

"That is definitely a possibility and is probably going to be at least somewhat a part of the techniques that develop in creating an industrial manufacturing line of organs," Rinella said.

Nick Balisteri, a Bedford resident who works on the commercialization side of the biotech and pharma industries, was curious about whether different cell lines needed different micro-environments to grow.

"In general stem cells, pretty much any mammalian cells, are cultured at 95 percent humidity, 5 percent CO2, and grown at 37 degrees Celsius," Rinella said. "We're trying to mimic in vivo the internal body atmosphere conditions, and that does not vary by cell line."

It's a process that sounds as complicated as, say, quantum physics — the subject of the March 2 Science on Tap talk. Visit https://see-sciencecenter.org/adults/ for details.

Mike Cote is senior editor for news and business. Contact him at mcote@unionleader.com or (603) 206-7724.

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