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Doctors grow new trachea from patient’s own adult stem cells

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From the Wall Street Journal.

Excerpt:

Doctors have replaced the cancer-stricken windpipe of a patient with an organ made in a lab, a landmark achievement for regenerative medicine. The patient no longer has cancer and is expected to have a normal life expectancy, doctors said.

[…]The windpipe is a hollow tube, about 4.5 inches long, leading to the lungs. A key part of it is a scaffold—which functions like a skeleton for the organ—consisting of tissues such as cartilage and muscle. As a first step, a team led by Alexander Seifalian of University College London used plastic materials and nanotechnology to make an artificial version of the scaffold in the lab. It was closely modeled on the shape and size of the Eritrean man’s windpipe.

Meanwhile, researchers at Harvard Bioscience Inc. of Holliston, Mass., made a bioreactor, a shoe-box-size device similar to a spinning rotisserie machine. The artificial scaffold was placed on the bioreactor, and stem cells extracted from the patient’s bone marrow were dripped onto the revolving scaffold for two days.

With the patient on the surgery table, Dr. Macchiarini and colleagues then added chemicals to the stem cells, persuading them to differentiate into tissue—such as bony cells—that make up the windpipe.

About 48 hours after the transplant, imaging and other studies showed appropriate cells in the process of populating the artificial windpipe, which had begun to function like a natural one. There was no rejection by the patient’s immune system, because the cells used to seed the artificial windpipe came from the patient’s own body.

Another success for ethical adult stem cell research.

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Adult stem cells used to grow a new heart

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From Life Site News. (H/T Letitia)

Excerpt:

Researchers at the University of Minnesota used adult stem cells to create a living human heart that they hope will revolutionize transplants.

The breakthrough, said lead researcher Dr. Doris Taylor, could ultimately mean that “donated” hearts are no longer used in transplant operations, circumventing the ethical problems involved in organ donation and obviating the need for drugs to combat immune system rejection.

Dr. Taylor, director of the university’s Center for Cardiovascular Repair, is one of the world’s leaders in heart organ repair and regeneration and has said it is her goal to create a living heart that can be transplanted into a patient, entirely out of stem cells.

She presented her team’s findings at the American College of Cardiology’s annual conference in New Orleans.

“The hearts are growing, and we hope they will show signs of beating within the next weeks,” she told the Daily Mail. “There are many hurdles to overcome to generate a fully functioning heart, but my prediction is that it may one day be possible to grow entire organs for transplant.”

The breakthrough is a follow-up on work Dr. Taylor completed in 2008 in which her team used stem cells to rebuild the hearts of rats. They removed all the muscle cells in a rat heart, leaving just a “scaffold” of other tissues such as blood vessels and valves. This scaffold was then repopulated with stem cells, which took their cues from the scaffold tissue to regenerate healthy, functioning heart muscle.

Another scientific breakthrough for ethical adult stem cells.

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CBS News discovers that adult stem cells produce more treatments

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Story here from CBS News. (H/T Hot Air via ECM)

Excerpt:

A few months ago, Dr. Thomas Einhorn was treating a patient with a broken ankle that wouldn’t heal, even with multiple surgeries. So he sought help from the man’s own body.

Einhorn drew bone marrow from the man’s pelvic bone with a needle, condensed it to about four teaspoons of rich red liquid, and injected that into his ankle.

Four months later the ankle was healed. Einhorn, chairman of orthopedic surgery at Boston University Medical Center, credits “adult” stem cells in the marrow injection. He tried it because of published research from France.

Einhorn’s experience isn’t a rigorous study. But it’s an example of many innovative therapies doctors are studying with adult stem cells. Those are stem cells typically taken from bone marrow and blood – not embryos.

For all the emotional debate that began about a decade ago on allowing the use of embryonic stem cells, it’s adult stem cells that are in human testing today. An extensive review of stem cell projects and interviews with two dozen experts reveal a wide range of potential treatments.

This is important because embryonic stem cell research involves the destruction of human beings. Real little people that would grow up just like you and me. You have to destroy the embryo in order to get embryonic stem cells.

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