This looks quite disturbing but this should be one of the steps in helping rebuild our damaged brains. Use stem cells and the scaffolding provided and grow neurons externally, just to prove it can be done. Next step is to create the same nutrient rich location inside your brain and populate it with stem cells to create both neurons and blood vessels. This doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure this out. If we had a decent stroke association(One that I was leading) this would be being worked on. But alas, we have incompetent ones with no sense of helping survivors.
Great pictures at the link.
http://cnnphotos.blogs.cnn.com/2012/12/21/the-human-body-parts-store/?hpt=hp_c3
Alex Seifalian’s lab at University College London is helping humans
who lose body parts to repair their bodies the way a newt would if it
lost its tail – by growing another.
The researchers in his lab, which Seifalian calls “the human body
parts store,” create the body parts with synthetic materials and a
patient’s stem cells.
The lab builds a scaffold of the needed body part with a porous
nanocomposite material, developed and patented by the team, and then
puts it in a bioreactor with some of the patient’s bone marrow. The
patient’s cells cover the scaffold and fill its many holes so that it
essentially becomes the patient’s own.
After it is inserted into the patient, it’s absorbed by the body and replaced by new cells over time.
The team has successfully developed a small artery bypass graft and
an artificial trachea, or windpipe, both first-evers that are now at
work inside patients.
Seifalian’s lab, at UCL’s Department of Nanotechnology and
Regenerative Medicine, recently took on a compassionate case of growing a
nose for a 56-year-old man who had had his nose removed during cancer
treatment. The man had a prosthetic plastic nose attached to glasses
that he could wear, but he chose to not go out in public very often.
Earlier in December, after the nose had been forming in a glass jar
for about four weeks, the lab-grown nose was implanted under the man’s
arm. The patient’s doctor will move it to his face after it further
develops under his skin. For the first year, the nostrils will remain
sealed to avoid infection.
“You work in a lab all alone, don’t see the future of it,” Seifalian
said. “What’s most exciting is that the things we make go to patients.”
Future is development of organ using offshelf scaffold made from nanotechnology and patient stem cells.
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