WINSTON-SALEM, N.C., Feb. 6, 2008
Grow Your Own Replacement Parts
Researchers Believe Regenerative Medicine Could Help Thousands In Need Of Transplants
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Play CBS Video Video Eye To Eye: Tissue Engineering "Only On The Web": Wyatt Andrews visits a laboratory at the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, where scientists like Anthony Atala, M.D., are researching new methods to grow body parts.
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This woman is receiving a bladder transplant - with a new bladder grown from her own cells. (CBS)
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Dr Anthony Atala (CBS)
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Interactive HealthWatch Explore health issues including AIDS, cancer and antibiotics.
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Video Archive Eye On Health CBS News medical correspondent Dr. Jon LaPook examines various health issues and treatments.
In what you might call the laboratory of the future, Dr Anthony Atala is manufacturing body parts.
"Here you see an engineered blood vessel," he said. "You can actually see the vessel beating."
From blood vessels to muscle tissue, Atala and his team at Wake Forest University believe that in theory anything inside the body can be grown outside the body, CBS News correspondent Wyatt Andrews reports. And it's real: They've made 18 different types of tissue so far.
"That's a heart valve?" Andrews asked.
Atala said: "This is an engineered heart valve."
What he pointed to was a pulsing heart valve to be transplanted into a sheep.
"When people ask me 'what do you do,' we grow tissues and organs," he said. "We are making body parts that we can implant right back into patients."
Once considered a Frankenstein fantasy, the field of regenerative medicine is on the verge of unimagined breakthroughs. Scientists believe every part of the body has cells capable of regeneration - all researchers need to do is isolate those cells and coax them to grow.
And they use heart cells in an ink jet printer.
In the lab CBS News toured, the heart of a mouse was being made - a heart they grew layer by layer, by spraying the cells with a printer.
"So your heart cell is programmed to make more heart tissue, your bladder cells are programmed to make more bladder cells," Atala explained.
And it's Atala's work with human bladders that's truly on the frontier. In a clinical trial at Thomas Jefferson Hospital in Philadelphia, a patient got a bladder transplant - with a new bladder grown from her own cells.
Using Atala's regeneration techniques, her bladder cells were isolated, multiplied and seeded onto a biodegradable scaffold. Eight weeks later, her new bladder is in the operating room ready for transplant.
Dr. Patrick Shenot is her transplant surgeon.
"Its very much the future, but its today," Shenot said. "We are doing this today."
What's coming from this technology is a future of highly personal, mail-order medicine, where in order to cure your disease, your doctor will order you a replacement organ or body part and it will be custom made for you, using your own cells.
For the tens of thousands of patients who need organ transplants, this technology brings hope.
Hugh Snyder needs a bladder. And it could be a bladder from his own cells.
"Yeah. I would never have thought this ... possible," Snyder said.
Corporate America already sees what's possible. The Tengion Company has bought the license, built the factory, and is already making the bladders developed at Wake Forest.
"We're actually building a very real business around a very real and compelling patient need," said Dr. Steven Nichtberger, Tengion's CEO.
He says the company also plans to mass-produce blood vessels and kidneys.
"In regenerative medicine, I think it is similar to the semiconductor industry of the 1980s," Nichtberger said. "You don't know where its going to go, but you know its big."
This brand-new kind of medicine and this brand-new industry are set to change the landscape for transplanting organs.
Patients in the future, instead of waiting years for a donated organ, will wait a few weeks and … grow their own.
For more on regenerative medicine and organ transplants, check out:
The McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine. The non-profit United Network for Organ Sharing. The non-profit Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network. The non-profit organ and tissue donation group, Gift Of Life Organ Donation. Wake Forest University. Tengion Company.
© MMVIII, CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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Best-selling author Mitch Albom on his first nonfiction work since "Tuesdays with Morrie."
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See all 51 Commentsand a couple livers....
Posted by veteran71
Good idea. It might be nice for victims of circumcisions. The terroristic attacks on American babies soon can be reversed...
Sincerely, Barbara
ST
"Our times are indeed dire, and foretold, and unfortunately there is little we can do to forestall the immediate crisis that confronts us.
However, we find ourselves at this moment in history for very simple reasons.
As I have said before, I am not religious. And yet I have found justice, compassion, and wisdom in the thoughts and writings of many historical religious, philosophical, and political figures.
And one of the saddest realities we face today is that so many of these wise men and women have already delivered most all the answers we seek.
Peace. Justice. Humility. Compassion. The willingness to stand for good when all others stand against it.
These are not new answers my friends, but amongst the oldest recorded. And when we abandon our most precious treasures of wisdom, we will suffer their warning.
But hope can never be lost. And there are times when suffering gives way to new understanding, and new opportunities to right the wrongs of the past, and boldly forge a more just and prosperous future for all.
I cannot help but hope that this is one of those times.
May goodness bless our great nation."
SearingTruth
- Posted by robert20076 at 08:49 AM : Feb 07, 2008
Good morning, Officer.
Be careful out there.
azcagirl
Thank you fellow patriot.
ST
"Nothing is certain, except that humanity is good."
SearingTruth
A Future of the Brave - www.searingtruth.com
The most drastic evolution in the history of the world is at our fingertips. Exciting and scary, and it all depends on the morals and ethics of who is in charge. It scares me to death to see we are at this level of technology and the most powerful government in the world has just been hijacked by the greediest, most unethical bunch of crooks this country has ever seen. I guess we''ll see how long the majority keep their head in the sand.
My friends, the simple truth is that we are wasting our precious time, resources, intellect, and passion. As a species we are just as aimless today as when our primitive ancestors first ventured out upon this earth.
Today I am proposing that for the first time in human history, we change that.
Radically.
More than any time in history, humanity needs a grand challenge. Not only to avert its extinction, but also to indelibly etch the common bond of mutual reliance and cooperation on current and future generations.
Fortunately, all of the forces that now seem to conspire against us can quickly be turned to our advantage.
For the first time in human history we actually possess technologies so advanced that any physical problem can potentially be solved.
And yet, I wonder, do we possess the will and wisdom to utilize them for our salvation instead of our destruction?
I propose that we find out.
So today I offer you a radical and stark choice between two future realities.
An aimless future of continued war and conflict, with all its accompanying suffering and death; or a limitless future dedicated to defeating suffering and death itself, with all its accompanying technological advancement and social evolution.
Excerpt from A Future of the Brave %u2013 www.searingtruth.com
Yes indeed, I have a new plan, for all of you. A plan of hope. A plan of adventure. A plan of such extraordinary magnitude as to take the breath, and challenge the senses, of all who would consider it. A plan to bind our common people in hope, and finally free our conscience for noble purpose.
I propose that in the next three decades we at last end the scourge of human disease upon this earth, and begin the inevitable adventure of humanity%u2019s migration beyond it.
We shall at last unlock the fundamental secrets of our biology so we may conquer any illness or defect at will, and we shall free ourselves from the bonds of our native home so we may evade global calamities, and begin the expansion of our species beyond this world.
No longer shall our survival be dependent upon the random and dispassionate forces of nature. No longer shall we quiver in anguish as we helplessly watch those we love suffer and die in agony from an endless list of human disease and dysfunction. No longer shall our globe be divided in constant turmoil and conflict while the hammer of fate hangs precariously balanced over all we know and love.
We shall at last take control of our future, our fate, and ourselves.
No other endeavor ever attempted by humankind will require more genius, dedication, compassion, and sacrifice.
And no other endeavor ever attempted by humankind will be more vital to the continued existence of our species.
www.searingtruth.com
Posted by Iceman_1960 at 05:36 AM : Feb 07, 2008
Hope trumps !
Please stop misquoting George Washington.
"It is impossible to rightly govern the world without God and the Bible." - Misattributed to George Washington
"Washington is known to have made some official statements of public piety, but this is not one of them. Though this assertion is very widely reported to have been said in Washington''s Farewell Address (17 September 1796), this is not actually the case, as any search of the documents would reveal."
Source:
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/George_Washington
singinrick
Well, the Christian militia fanatic Timothy McVeigh blew up the Murrow Federal Building with hundreds of innocent Americans, including children, in it.
And Christians in Utah have always had a whole swath of pedophile protected territory where even the police track down and bring daughters back to their fathers and uncles who are raping them, and trading them as sexual slaves.
And they consume one of the most deadly drugs known to humankind, alcohol, while imprisoning those who ingest drugs equally or less destructive to life in prison.
And they preemptively attack other countries in the name of peace.
And they demand that the name of their God be present on our money, and our most hollowed halls of justice.
And they enshrine all their prejudicial beliefs, including those against homosexuals, in law.
Just like any religious fanatics in any other theocratic state.
ST
"Their inhumanity was confirmed by their ignorance of humanity itself."
SearingTruth
A Future of the Brave - www.searingtruth.com
Fortunately, there is a curious and wonderful fact about humanity.
Whenever we come together to focus on and solve some seemingly insurmountable problem, we are successful.
From initially learning to navigate vast oceans, to understanding and curing disease, to placing humans on the moon and exploring the solar system beyond, our species record of technical achievement is truly stunning.
In fact, history clearly records that our progress as a species is not impeded by our inability to solve critical problems; it is instead impeded by our inability to recognize and focus on them.
We have survived thus far not by elegant planning, but simply because of our once isolated population groups, the relatively low level of past technologies, and sheer dumb luck.
However, time has turned, and we cannot go back. Populations have become almost completely integrated, our technology has progressed to fantastic and globally lethal levels, and sooner or later our sheer dumb luck will run out.
Without direction, without a plan, without common goals and purpose, our species, and our world, will fail.
All our history, all our dreams, all our knowledge, our anguish, our joy, our victories, our defeats, all of our passion, everything that was human, gone forever. As if it had never existed in time at all. ...
Excerpt from A Future of the Brave - www.searingtruth.com
Speak for yourself, ST.
There"s nothing precious about mine.
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