Doctors from Omaha are making breakthroughs in research that some said couldn't be done. The tissue engineering is being done in Boston.

A rat is part of a remarkable story. Its spine was severed but the rat later walked again. That was in 1995, a significant achievement in tissue engineering.

That field of research all started with the heartfelt determination of Omaha native, Dr. Joseph Vacanti.

As a pediatric surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, too many of his young patients in need of a transplant were suffering or dying because of a shortage of organs.

"So I said there must be a better way to do this," Dr. Vacanti tells us. "And the obvious answer is, if you can't wait for something, then why don't you just build it."

That was in 1984 and Dr. Vacanti has been working on building vital organs ever since.

Along the way his brothers, all doctors, joined him in Boston and have contributed to the research. The ultimate goal is to build vital organs in the lab, using the patients own cells.

Dr. Vacanti says, "Generally we build living tissue like we build a building. So we create the scaffold but instead of having bricks on the scaffold, think of the bricks as being smart and being living. And that's really how we do it because the bricks are living cells."

The idea is to use that "scaffolding" in such a way that cells form to it and within it to regenerate parts of the body.

"We're still in animals but very close to trying this in humans," Dr. Vacanti says. This is the advanced state of 20 years of work."

Building a vital organ in the lab is much more complex. Blood has to flow to each cell for nourishment.

Our vital organs have thousands of channels in place for that blood to flow and that system has to be duplicated in the lab. A silicon wafer appears to be the answer.

Dr. Vacanti says, "It's made for the computer industry for computer chips but what you see here is instead of an electrical circuit on a computer chip, this is a vascular circuit of channels so that we can actually flow blood through this. And by designing this in the exact same way that nature does, we now have an ability to build something as large as a liver or a kidney and that is a huge breakthrough. So, the landscaping has changed but it was a very radical notion when we began."

A stack of 10 vascular channels on one of those silicon wafers is about the width of a credit card. Replicating that will eventually create the vast network necessary for a vital organ.

Dr. Vacanti has worked with Robert Langer of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to engineer all the new technology.

Joseph Vacanti's brother Charles has been in Mexico doing research on dogs with spinal injuries. It's based on the research that allowed that rat to walk after the spine injury. The results are expected in the spring.

Dr. Martin Vacanti is the one who discovered the cells that were used in the experiment with the rat. He was the first in the world to isolate that cell. It's like a stem cell but more hardy.

We met Dr. Frank Vacanti earlier this week. (Click Here For Details)