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ENNISKILLEN, Northern Ireland (AP) — Talks on a sweeping trade deal between the European Union and the United States are to get underway in Washington next month, President Barack Obama and top European Union officials said Monday.

"The EU-U.S. relationship is the biggest in the world," Obama said after meeting with European leaders at the G-8 summit in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland, citing roughly the $1 trillion in trade in goods and services between the two every year.

"This potentially ground-breaking partnership would deepen those ties."

The head of the EU's executive arm, European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso, said a deal could bring "huge economic benefits" to both sides.

Summit host British Prime Minister David Cameron said the trade pact could create 2 million jobs.

The aim of the trans-Atlantic deal would be to promote economic growth by eliminating the import tariffs and changing regulations that keep goods made on one side of the Atlantic from being sold on the other side.

Officials have said a deal could be reached next year. But securing one will be tricky. The talks will be watched warily by interest groups and would have to be approved by each side's lawmakers and leaders before the new trade arrangements take effect.

The EU has already yielded to a demand from France to exempt the TV and movie industry from the talks. Barroso said the exception for movies and TV shows could be revisited later. Meanwhile, U.S. labor officials have also expressed skepticism.

The statement of support for the trade deal came just ahead of the opening of the Group of Eight Summit among the leaders of leading industrial nations: The U.S., Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Japan, Canada and Russia, plus the European Union.

The host, British Prime Minister David Cameron, greeting the arriving leaders against a backdrop of green grass and stunning lake views at the Lough Erne golf resort near the small town of Enniskillen.

Later Monday over a working dinner, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russia's support for the Syrian government will be a topic for discussion.

Cameron said he wanted the summit to deliver a firm plan for promoting multi-faction talks in Geneva aimed at ending the country's bloody civil war. Moscow officially shares that goal but keeps shipping military aid to the army of Syrian President Bashar Assad.

Following a frosty Putin-Cameron meeting Sunday in London, the Russian leader remains opposed to plans by the West to start shipping weapons to rebels struggling to topple Assad.

Obama announced Friday that the U.S. would start sending weaponry, while Britain and France remained concerned that the firepower might end up helping anti-democratic extremists linked to Iran and Lebanon's Hezbollah militia.

__ Associated Press writers Cassandra Vinograd and Vladimir Isachenkov in Enniskillen contributed to this report.

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — Iran's newly elected president pledged on Monday to follow a "path of moderation" and promised greater openness over the country's nuclear program, but sided with the hard-line Islamic establishment that refuses to consider halting uranium enrichment.

However, the overall tone of Hasan Rowhani's first post-election news conference, will likely be viewed by the West as further evidence that his stunning victory last week could open new possibilities for dialogue to ease tensions over Tehran's disputed nuclear program.

In his outreach to Washington, Rowhani also had a dual message. He urged for no additional tensions and said both countries should "look to the future." But he repeated past statements from Iran's leadership that one-on-one talks are only possible if the U.S. vows to "never interfere in Iranian affairs."

Many other questions remain. Rowhani sidestepped the issue of Iran's close alliance with Syrian President Bashar Assad, saying only that the efforts to end the civil war and restore stability rest with the "Syrian people."

He also must balance the hopes of many supporters who want him to push hard against the ruling system. At the end of the news conference, a spectator yelled out for the release of opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi, who has been under house arrest for more than two years. Rowhani made no comment.

Rowhani does not have authority to set major policies, such as the direction of the nuclear program or relations with the West. All those decisions rest with the ruling clerics and the powerful Revolutionary Guard, which have so far appeared to embrace Rowhani but could easily turn against him if he is perceived as a threat to their grip on power.

Rowhani, however, can use the strength of his landslide victory and his influential connections, including with former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, to try to sway policies. He also will serve as Iran's main international envoy and is almost certain to present a much milder tone than his combative predecessor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who is to formally give up power in August.

This could help lower political friction between Iran and the West and also undercut calls by some factions in Israel and the U.S. to study military options against Iran's nuclear facilities.

The 64-year-old Rowhani — the only cleric in the presidential race — described his election as opening a "new era" and said he would "follow the path of moderation and justice, not extremism."

"We have to enhance mutual trust between Iran and other countries," he said. "We have to build trust."

He also said dealing with the economy was among his priorities, in a clear reference to how Western sanctions over Iran's nuclear efforts have helped spike inflation to more than 30 percent and slashed vital revenue. Previously, Rowhani — a former nuclear negotiator — criticized Iranian positions that have led to increased sanctions but also described the economic pressures by the U.S. and others as "oppressive."

"The Iranian nation has done nothing to deserve sanctions. The work it has done has been within international frameworks . If sanctions have any benefits, they will only benefit Israel. They have no benefits for others," he said.

He promised to encourage "step by step" measures to reassure the West over Iran's nuclear ambitions. The West claims that Iran is seeking a nuclear weapon. Iranian leaders, including Rowhani, insist Iran seeks reactors only for energy and medical applications.

Enriched uranium is used as fuel for energy and research reactors but it can be further boosted to make a nuclear warhead.

"The first step will be showing greater transparency. We are ready to show greater transparency and make clear that the Islamic Republic of Iran's actions are totally within international frameworks," he said. "The second step is promoting mutual confidence. We'll take measures in both fields. The first goal is that no new sanctions are imposed. Then, that the (existing) sanctions are reduced."

On Syria, he said the ultimate responsibility to resolve the more than two-year-old civil war should be in the hands of the "Syrian people."

"We are opposed to foreign intervention," he said. "We hope peace and tranquility will return to Syria through the cooperation with countries of the region and world."

Rowhani formally takes office in August. In the meantime, it appears Ahmadinejad's political foes could be plotting a payback, underscoring the often cutthroat nature of internal Iranian affairs.

Iran's official news agency said a criminal court summoned Ahmadinejad over a lawsuit filed by the country's parliament speaker and others.

Monday's report by IRNA gave no further details, but Ahmadinejad and the speaker, Ali Larijani, have waged political feuds for years. In February, Ahmadinejad released a barely audible videotape that purported to show discussion over bribes that included Larijani's brother. A parliamentary committee also joined Larijani in the legal action.

IRNA, which comes under the president's authority, noted there were several other subpoenas issued previously against Ahmadinejad and described the latest as unconstitutional. The court has set a November date for Ahmadinejad's appearance, it said.

NEW YORK (AP) -- By the time 10-year-old Sarah Murnaghan finally got a lung transplant last week, she'd been waiting for months, and her parents had sued to give her a better shot at surgery.

Her cystic fibrosis was threatening her life, and her case spurred a debate on how to allocate donor organs. Lungs and other organs for transplant are scarce.

But what if there were another way? What if you could grow a custom-made organ in a lab?

It sounds incredible. But just a three-hour drive from the Philadelphia hospital where Sarah got her transplant, another little girl is benefiting from just that sort of technology. Two years ago, Angela Irizarry of Lewisburg, Pa., needed a crucial blood vessel. Researchers built her one in a laboratory, using cells from her own bone marrow. Today the 5-year-old sings, dances and dreams of becoming a firefighter - and a doctor.

Growing lungs and other organs for transplant is still in the future, but scientists are working toward that goal. In North Carolina, a 3-D printer builds prototype kidneys. In several labs, scientists study how to build on the internal scaffolding of hearts, lungs, livers and kidneys of people and pigs to make custom-made implants.

Here's the dream scenario: A patient donates cells, either from a biopsy or maybe just a blood draw. A lab uses them, or cells made from them, to seed onto a scaffold that's shaped like the organ he needs. Then, says Dr. Harald Ott of Massachusetts General Hospital, "we can regenerate an organ that will not be rejected (and can be) grown on demand and transplanted surgically, similar to a donor organ."

That won't happen anytime soon for solid organs like lungs or livers. But as Angela Irizarry's case shows, simpler body parts are already being put into patients as researchers explore the possibilities of the field.

Just a few weeks ago, a girl in Peoria, Ill., got an experimental windpipe that used a synthetic scaffold covered in stem cells from her own bone marrow. More than a dozen patients have had similar operations.

Dozens of people are thriving with experimental bladders made from their own cells, as are more than a dozen who have urethras made from their own bladder tissue. A Swedish girl who got a vein made with her marrow cells to bypass a liver vein blockage in 2011 is still doing well, her surgeon says.

In some cases the idea has even become standard practice. Surgeons can use a patient's own cells, processed in a lab, to repair cartilage in the knee. Burn victims are treated with lab-grown skin.

In 2011, it was Angela Irizarry's turn to wade into the field of tissue engineering.

Angela was born in 2007 with a heart that had only one functional pumping chamber, a potentially lethal condition that leaves the body short of oxygen. Standard treatment involves a series of operations, the last of which implants a blood vessel near the heart to connect a vein to an artery, which effectively rearranges the organ's plumbing.

Yale University surgeons told Angela's parents they could try to create that conduit with bone marrow cells. It had already worked for a series of patients in Japan, but Angela would be the first participant in an American study.

"There was a risk," recalled Angela's mother, Claudia Irizarry. But she and her husband liked the idea that the implant would grow along with Angela, so that it wouldn't have to be replaced later.

So, over 12 hours one day, doctors took bone marrow from Angela and extracted certain cells, seeded them onto a 5-inch-long biodegradable tube, incubated them for two hours, and then implanted the graft into Angela to grow into a blood vessel.

It's been almost two years and Angela is doing well, her mother says. Before the surgery she couldn't run or play without getting tired and turning blue from lack of oxygen, she said. Now, "she is able to have a normal play day."

This seed-and-scaffold approach to creating a body part is not as simple as seeding a lawn. In fact, the researchers in charge of Angela's study had been putting the lab-made blood vessels into people for nearly a decade in Japan before they realized that they were completely wrong in their understanding of what was happening inside the body.

"We'd always assumed we were making blood vessels from the cells we were seeding onto the graft," said Dr. Christopher Breuer, now at Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio. But then studies in mice showed that in fact, the building blocks were cells that migrated in from other blood vessels. The seeded cells actually died off quickly. "We in essence found out we had done the right thing for the wrong reasons," Breuer said.

Other kinds of implants have also shown that the seeded cells can act as beacons that summon cells from the recipient's body, said William Wagner, director of the McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh. Sometimes that works out fine, but other times it can lead to scarring or inflammation instead, he said. Controlling what happens when an engineered implant interacts with the body is a key challenge, he said.

So far, the lab-grown parts implanted in people have involved fairly simple structures - basically sheets, tubes and hollow containers, notes Anthony Atala of Wake Forest University whose lab also has made scaffolds for noses and ears. Solid internal organs like livers, hearts and kidneys are far more complex to make.

His pioneering lab at Wake Forest is using a 3-D printer to make miniature prototype kidneys, some as small as a half dollar, and other structures for research. Instead of depositing ink, the printer puts down a gel-like biodegradable scaffold plus a mixture of cells to build a kidney layer by layer. Atala expects it will take many years before printed organs find their way into patients.

Another organ-building strategy used by Atala and maybe half a dozen other labs starts with an organ, washes its cells off the inert scaffolding that holds cells together, and then plants that scaffolding with new cells.

"It's almost like taking an apartment building, moving everybody out ... and then really trying to repopulate that apartment building with different cells," says Dr. John LaMattina of the University of Maryland School of Medicine. He's using the approach to build livers. It's the repopulating part that's the most challenging, he adds.

One goal of that process is humanizing pig organs for transplant, by replacing their cells with human ones.

"I believe the future is ... a pig matrix covered with your own cells," says Doris Taylor of the Texas Heart Institute in Houston. She reported creating a rudimentary beating rat heart in 2008 with the cell-replacement technique and is now applying it to a variety of organs.

Ott's lab and the Yale lab of Laura Niklason have used the cell-replacement process to make rat lungs that worked temporarily in those rodents. Now they're thinking bigger, working with pig and human lung scaffolds in the lab. A human lung scaffold, Niklason notes, feels like a handful of Jell-O.

Cell replacement has also worked for kidneys. Ott recently reported that lab-made kidneys in rats didn't perform as well as regular kidneys. But, he said, just a "good enough organ" could get somebody off dialysis. He has just started testing the approach with transplants in pigs.

Ott is also working to grow human cells on human and pig heart scaffolds for study in the laboratory.

There are plenty of challenges with this organ-building approach. One is getting the right cells to build the organ. Cells from the patient's own organ might not be available or usable. So Niklason and others are exploring genetic reprogramming so that, say, blood or skin cells could be turned into appropriate cells for organ-growing.

Others look to stem cells from bone marrow or body fat that could be nudged into becoming the right kinds of cells for particular organs. In the near term, organs might instead be built with donor cells stored in a lab, and the organ recipient would still need anti-rejection drugs.

How long until doctors start testing solid organs in people? Ott hopes to see human studies on some lab-grown organ in five to 10 years. Wagner calls that very optimistic and thinks 15 to 20 years is more realistic. Niklason also forecasts two decades for the first human study of a lung that will work long-term.

But LaMattina figures five to 10 years might be about right for human studies of his specialty, the liver.

"I'm an optimist," he adds. "You have to be an optimist in this job."

--- Michael Rubinkam in Lewisburg, Pa., and Allen Breed in Winston-Salem, N.C., contributed to this story.