To clarify: we are proposing, prototyping and developing a proof-of-concept clinically engineered football – a football which will be grown from living animal cells to our own bespoke design.

To this end it will be necessary to create an environment within which these cells can grow and also, we need to make a structure onto which the cells can adhere so that they can take on our desired football shape.  Last week, in the lab, I set up a simple spinning flask bio-reactor to see if this would encourage cell growth onto a nylon scaffold material (which has, up until now, proved elusive).

A square piece of the nylon scaffold material was suspended inside the spinning flask using a piece of wire and a high concentration of mouse cells (approximately 10 million) were introduced into 200ml of medium.

After two days, it appeared that the some cells were attaching to the scaffold – a very positive sign – and so the next step was to establish whether this truly was a viable way to encourage the cells to adhere to the scaffoldor perhaps the cells had just settled there as a result of the flow of the medium in the flask.

The square of nylon mesh material was transferred to a petri-dish with fresh medium and placed within an incubator to see if the cells would continue to grow in a stable way and perhaps even fully populate the mesh of the scaffold.

A few days later and the cells still seem to be adhering to the scaffold rather well.n  Whether they will grow further, and inhabit the whole scaffold remains to be seen, but it seems clear that they are bridging the large gaps between the different strands of the nylon material – a good sign.   This spinning flask technique for seeding the cells onto the scaffold seems to be a step in the right direction – in the coming weeks I will try this same experiment with many different kinds of cell and scaffold material to try and identify optimum combinations for growing our football material.

If you compare our proposed clinically engineered football, which will be grown using living organic matter, to the footballs used competitively today (which are made of synthetic materials) it is clear that we are taking a totally different trajectory in terms of how a football is designed and made.

Below is a video showing the mechanised production process for the Adidas Jabulani ball which was used during the 2010 World Cup in South Africa:

In 2010, Professor Andy Miah identified in a short blog post a range of ethical questions surrounding the introduction of new technology within sport, and gave his perspective on the commotion surrounding the Adidas Jabulani World Cup Football, which was claimed to be the most perfectly spherical ball to date. He points out that:

In most cases, what unites new sports technologies is their common pursuit of reducing the uncertainty brought to the playing field by unforeseeable environmental changes.

(Andy Miah, 2010, “Fifa World Cup”)

This principle seems to hold true even of the Uppies and Downies balls, made in Workington by Mark Rawlinson for one of the few authentic “mob football” games still taking place at Easter time in England each year.

The Uppies and Downies ball is made using four panels of tough saddle leather and it is filled with wool-flock so that the ball will float if it goes in water. These distinct properties of the ball help to facilitate a game where the ball itself is put under intense physical pressure, and where achieving a goal can involve wading in rivers and swimming in the harbour!  The Uppies and Downies ball is not only for playing the game though – it is also the trophy which the victor takes away – a unique object – symbolic of victory.

This leads us to some interesting new questions for this development period:

What might be the desirable properties which we would like to bestow on our lab grown ball? How might players at all levels adapt to this new kind of ball?

“First Organ Transplant” hangs in the hall at the Harvard Medical School and presumably was produced as a kind of testimony to this key moment in twentieth century medical history.  The paintings subject matter is important however the piece itself is a very conventional oil painting, in a kind of classical-realist tradition which presents all of the key figures convening at this seminal moment across the two theatres. It would not take a big stretch of the imagination to compare this staging with familiar episodes from Christian religious narrative, perhaps even the birth of Christ in the stable after all we do have three wise men entering from the left.

This kind of re-construction is one of the common ways in which people expect see a relationship between science, technology and art: an artist will illustrate or interpret existing cultural phenomena, and in the process, might bring their own spin to things, but the phenomena is always held up as primary and distinct from the artist or documentarian’s secondary perspective.

I think it is important to make the point that Pigs Bladder Football attempts to operate in a very different way artistically to this kind of work. Rather than illustrate something from the field of science, our project proposes new trajectories and kinships in the domains of sport and art.  More than this, we are presenting something “concrete” (a real object) – the first clinically engineered football – our art is not a signifier of something else.  Pigs Bladder Football aims for a level of agency and criticality within the very materials and processes being used – and draws upon a rich material history within football whilst engaging with current artistic practices such as the field of bio-art.

The process of developing this unique object in the laboratory refuses notions of “critical distance” being instead contemporaneous with current scientific applications.

• mouse cells are growing but need more!
• scaffold in development
• new source identified for pigs bladder tissue material

So this week I decided to revisit a TED (Technology, Enertainment and Design) talk presented by Anthony Atala M.D. in 2009, where he describes some processes and applications of his research in clinical engineering.

You can watch the talk below:

http://www.ted.com/talks/anthony_atala_growing_organs_engineering_tissue.html

Here are some interesting things I gleaned from the presentation:

The reason Atala puts forward for tissue engineering organs is identified very early on and is dead simple – there is a major shortage of donors and, as medicine keeps us alive for longer, organs fail more. Atala points out that, whilst stem cells can provide a great promise for the future, when it comes to getting stem cells into patients in a way which is predictable and consistent, there is a long way to go.

We are then shown an image of the Salamander – an animal which can regenerate its own limbs from the scar tissue – and the question is posed: Why can’t humans regenerate?

Atala explains that we can – but we can only regenerate over small distances – about 1cm. If we could bridge the gaps, then every organ in body has cell population ready to take over.

This cultivation of cells across gaps is where clinical engineering might provide some help.

Some great examples of cells being used to regenerate new material are shown in the talk, including at 6.27 where we see the exercizing of cells in a muscle bio-reactor and at 6.55 where a blood vessel is constructed and exercized using a tubular scaffold with muscle cells on outside and a lining of vascular blood vessel cells on the inside.

Anthony Atala was involved in the first ever artificial bladder transplant and at just before 9mins there is a handy diagram of their process for using cells to grow a new human bladder structure. After that we see the scaffold too.

When the possibilities of this research for the human species are considered, the presentation is jaw dropping at times but Anthony Atala makes some important points at the end when he reminds us that many of these techniques are still in development and before they can be put to clinical use we need to be sure that they do no harm. His test so far for whether to proceed is reassuringly human: “Are you ready to place this in your own child?”

During the past week I have been maintaining and preparing the various cell types which I’ll be experimenting with in order to find out which are most suitable for using in the football production.

At the moment, in culture in the laboratory I have four types of cell at my disposal:

• mouse bladder cells (mixed/specific cell types unknown) obtained from several mouse bladders using a very basic primary culture extraction protocol.

And also:

• rat bladder cells (mixed / specific cell types unknown) – Basically, to obtain both of these types of bladder cells the entirety of the bladder tissue was chopped up in a sterile environment and then broken down using a laboratory enzyme (collagenase).  The resulting solution was then sieved and put into medium and incubated.  I attempted to use the same procedure to obtain pig bladder cells from abattoir by-products a few weeks ago and was unsuccessful, so a more advanced protocol will be needed.

Plus:

• pig bone marrow adult stem cells which were obtained from inside a pig knee bone before Christmas.  These have been proliferating quite slowly, but successfully and I was able to freeze one batch of these before Christmas.  Being multi-potent “mesenchymal” stem cells they have the potential to change into different kinds of connective tissue cell depending on the different environmental and chemical triggers.

Finally:

• some very resilient and quick growing mouse cells which I have been maintaining since the very start of my residency.  The exact history of these cells is a little unclear.  I do know that they originated from a commercially available cell line – L929 fibroblast cells – which are a type of connective tissue obtained from adipose (fat) and which had been cryogenically frozen several years before I came to the lab by a researcher called “Richard”.

I’ll be attempting to grow each of these different cell types (and others) onto various hexagon and pentagon patch shaped scaffolds over the coming months to get an idea of the material properties of this spherical structure and also, crucially, get a sense of the timeframe for completing a football.

It is appropriate that I will be beginning with the L929(R) mouse cells as I have these in the greatest number (I froze several vials of these – many million cells – before Christmas) and I have the most experience with the growth cycle of this type of cell.

This is the first of my new weekly dispatches from the UK Biomaterials and Tissue Engineering Centre (Liverpool) where I am working as an artist in residence.  Tissue engineering is a field growing in importance: in 2006 the urinary bladder was the first organ to be successfully grown artificially in a laboratory and transplanted into a human patient and this kind of scientific breakthrough has huge implications for the future of medicine, potentially allowing cancerous tissue to be removed and replaced with a patients own healthy adult stem cells.

Beyond clinical treatments, the field of tissue engineering suggests many possibilities for new kinds of industrial application.  As an artist (and non-scientist) I am interested in unanticipated future uses of such technologies and through this work established scientific processes are instrumentalised toward an unlikely, playful and aesthetic goal.

Our “Pigs Bladder Football” project has a very specific, and non-clinical aim: to grow a football from living animal cells.  Our football will embody advanced 21st century biotechnological processes raising some interesting questions along the way such as: What are legitimate uses of living biological matter? and What new kinds of industry will make use of these materials?

Outlined already in previous short post are the various stages we will need to go through to cultivate the football – from the identification and isolation of cell materials (hopefully from pigs bladders obtained from a local abattoir) through to the growth of these cells on simple patch-like scaffolds and, ultimately, getting the cells to adhere to a 3D football like shape.

Today Theun helped me to begin work with a small DIY bioreactor (spinner flask).  It is basically a jar with a small wire attached to the lid for suspending our 3D test scaffolds.  A special device causes a magnetic element placed in the flask to spin at a constant rate, meaning that our cells can be kept in a dynamic state giving them more of a chance to adhere to the surface of the suspended patch materials.

Below is a simple demonstration of the spinner flask bio-reactor in action.  I am just getting to grips with using the camera in the lab but I hope to include more of these short insights as I go along.

Spinner Flask from John 0Shea on Vimeo.

Having achieved cell adherence onto different patch materials it will be important to attempt to grow cells onto 3D forms, starting with some simple cubes of mesh and work towards growing the cells onto a 3D printed football form.  This will require research into rapid prototyping materials and methods for 3D printing.

[image: truncated icosahedron - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truncated_icosahedron]

Whilst the procedure for seeding patches with cells is being optimised I will be working on obtaining, growing, freezing and maintaining different primary cell cultures using predominantly materials which would be thrown away.  The first of these was the pig knee joint and I hope to be able to use learn and adapt a procedure for obtaining cells from the discarded pigs bladders.  It is hoped that some of these cell materials will be seeded onto suitable patches where their growth can be observed and documented and their suitability as material for our football assessed and compared.  Regards the question of suitability – we are looking for a cell material which will adhere well to our final 3D structure and, which is capable of forming a membrane which is impermeable to air and which can be subject to pressure.

[Images: pig knee joint with trotter in sterile hood. John O'Shea]

Grow a set of “patches”, working with nylon mesh material of the kind which is already used as a scaffold in tissue engineering.  This will involve seeding our cells (initially the L929 mouse cells) directly onto various types of polymer patch in order that we can monitor growth rates and also to see if an air tight membrane can be achieved.

[Image – Net of the “buckyball” (traditional football shape) Link: http://gwydir.demon.co.uk/jo/solid/other.htm]

Pig’s Bladder Football moves into a new phase for 2012 – having spent the summer of 2011 researching age-old processes of making footballs from the bladders of pigs which have been slaughtered – we now are looking to the future.

Continuing the collaboration with Abandon Normal Devices, and funded by the Wellcome Trust, I will be working in residence at the Clinical Engineering Unit at the University of Liverpool where, over the course of this year, I will be using processes of animal cell culture to attempt to “grow” a football using living cells.

This is an ambitious project – but not impossible!

We don’t know what size or form the football will take yet (although Professor John Hunt, who is a partner in this work, is insistent that it must bounce!)

The image above shows a flask of one of the cell cultures we are currently maintaining.  Back in November, bone marrow cells were harvested from the knee of a pig which had already been slaughtered and now the are being grown within a medium in the laboratory.

These cells (and millions more) will combine to make a football fitting for the 21st Century.

More information here soon.

John O’Shea, January 2012