Friday, December 21, 2012

Building human body parts

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.”

1 comment:

  1. Future is development of organ using offshelf scaffold made from nanotechnology and patient stem cells.

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