AKU researchers to grow mini-intestines to study malnutrition.

KARACHI -- Researchers at Aga Khan University (AKU) are harnessing the power of stem cells to create mini-intestines that can generate new insights into how malnutrition occurs.

The National Nutrition Survey 2018 shows that malnutrition is a major public health problem in the developing world, with four out of 10 children under the age of five in Pakistan suffering from stunting while one in three children is underweight.

According to experts, an important contributor to childhood malnutrition and its associated morbidities is environmental enteropathy - a poorly defined state of intestinal inflammation without overt diarrhoea that occurs due to continued exposure to poor sanitation and hygiene.

Existing research into malnutrition, they say, has extensively documented its causes and shed light on the structural and genetic differences between a healthy and a malnourished intestine. However, until now researchers have been unable to explore how environmental enteropathy originates at the cell level, especially in young children.

'Stem cell technology has enabled us to successfully grow intestinal organoids or mini-intestines, from the tissue of malnourished children. This provides us with an excellent model to safely conduct experiments to explore disease processes, study gut infections and vaccine failure in malnourished children, and identify different therapeutic strategies to reverse the...