9 replies to this topic

[Liquidus]

http://www.scienceda...80113142205.htm

This was actually on Global/CTV News (National news syndicates here in Canada) as top stories, very interesting find!



Perhaps someone with more refined knowledge can explain how this finding will influence medicine in the future. From what I gather, this gives hope that eventually, heart-related illnesses will pale in comparison to before, people will be able to 'grow' alternative hearts and have the new heart transfered in, with the old/bad one removed.

Edited by G Snake, 15 January 2008 - 12:20 AM.

[JonesGuy]

http://www.scienceda...80113142205.htm

This was actually on Global/CTV News (National news syndicates here in Canada) as top stories, very interesting find!



Perhaps someone with more refined knowledge can explain how this finding will influence medicine in the future. From what I gather, this gives hope that eventually, heart-related illnesses will pale in comparison to before, people will be able to 'grow' alternative hearts and have the new heart transfered in, with the old/bad one removed.

You've got the gist.

The actual goal here is organ transplant. We have many, many research projects with regards to the heart and obviously transplant is one of the last options. But even with that, we don't have enough hearts. If we had enough hearts, then the world would be a better place.

Apparently growing a heart is a 'low-hanging fruit', and might be one of the easier organs to grow. I don't know enough about that to comment.

[Athanasios]

Wow. Wonderful. I hope it pans out.

It seems decellularization may be a solution -- essentially using nature's platform to create a bioartifical heart, she said.

Decellularization is the process of removing all of the cells from an organ -- in this case an animal cadaver heart -- leaving only the extracellular matrix, the framework between the cells, intact.

After successfully removing all of the cells from both rat and pig hearts, researchers injected them with a mixture of progenitor cells that came from neonatal or newborn rat hearts and placed the structure in a sterile setting in the lab to grow.

The results were very promising, Taylor said. Four days after seeding the decellularized heart scaffolds with the heart cells, contractions were observed. Eight days later, the hearts were pumping....

Although heart repair was the first goal during research, decellularization shows promising potential to change how scientists think about engineering organs, Taylor said. "It opens a door to this notion that you can make any organ: kidney, liver, lung, pancreas -- you name it and we hope we can make it," she said.

[maestro949]

That's awesome. Especially if hearts can be regrown from the patient's own stem cells to avoid rejection issues. The survival rates of heart transplants have improved dramatically in the last decade alone. This would improve them even more. Here's a chart showing the Mayo Clinic's survival rates...



Image Source: Mayo Clinic Website

There's one guy who's been alive for 28 years with a transplanted heart!

Edited by maestro949, 15 January 2008 - 02:09 AM.

[Lazarus Long]

I posted this in stem cells earlier but it seems to me the subject is important enough to merit two separate threads anyway.

Here is a link to the articles in that thread.

Mammalian heart grown in vitro from scratch

And I think we should keep our eyes open for the published papers on the subject when they come out and share them here.

[caston]

What I really love about this. People were saying that growing organs was decades away and that was just last year!

[Lazarus Long]

What I really love about this. People were saying that growing organs was decades away and that was just last year!

While I understand and agree with your enthusiasm about this I think to be fair that what they are talking about is growing organs for human implantation, and that very well may still be decades away, though maybe just one instead of many.

It is also not a carte blanche on growing *any* organ. I do think hearts, livers, kidneys, pancreases and many simpler (or singular) but critically important organs will be easier to grow and implant than had been expected. I also think we will be growing limbs and eyes and other complex structures sooner than expected but a system is harder to grow than a single organ, also connecting the nerves of a structure like an eye is still a significant challenge to micro surgeons.

I have argued that this approach is far closer than and more practical than many have suspected and this result supports that conclusion but to be fair to the opponents this is only the beginning of the work and we should not jump to too many conclusions based o the result. It is however a very positive result that outlines a very great potential avenue of success.

BTW I think the same thing can be said about uploading. I think that the cybernetic interface of high order cognizance is closer and more possible than many critics acknowledge and like this result in organ growth it is an area where the success are exceeding expectation.

[caston]

Don't you agree that this kind of wide spread publicity increases the mindshare, momentum and funds towards this sort of development?

What I would love to see is kind of a Dr House or ER set in the year 2020.

Edited by caston, 15 January 2008 - 02:10 PM.

[Lazarus Long]

Don't you agree that this kind of wide spread publicity increases the mindshare, momentum and funds towards this sort of development?

Yes and I think the momentum for not only the development of these technologies but larger public support of organizations such as ours is shifting strongly in our favor. It is defintiely the time to build on this and confront the nay sayers but do so with an eye to recruiting the skeptics that may be helpful in finding the most serious problems to overcome and focusing sufficiently on those details to expose solutions. There is a critically important role for the rationally critical skeptic in this process.

What I would love to see is kind of a Dr House or ER set in the year 2020.

This may be a more important meme to work with than many imagine.

I think a careful blending of character development with subtle introductions of future tech could be a very powerful TV show. More the type of work I expect from the BBC now than our pathetic US television. We are immersed in a self inflicted wounding of the industry but in part due to their hubris and greed to begin with. This show could be built upon by striking writers that could build a production and online broadcast network through something like DivX and I suspect that in ten years they would rival HBO. The times are changing and the real problem with media is that they are not.

I remember when the ideas of scanners, subcutaneous needleless hypodermics and other future tech were the exclusive province of the Enterprises' medical facility and almost every doctor I knew simply laughed at the prospects. Now the reality is more like Star Trek than that of the horse and buggy generation of physicians who discounted such possibilities.

[caston]

Perhaps the next most obvious organ would be the pancreas.