Nov. 16, 2005 - 18:41 MST

PROGRESS INDEED

Medical research scientists are making great strides in growing various body tissues to do what artificial things can't do quite as well. In today's Rocky Mountain News is an article by Marilynn Marchione of the Associated Press about such advances. In full:

Dialysis patients get first blood vessels grown in lab

DALLAS --"Two kidney-dialysis patients from Argentina have received the world's first blood vessels grown in a lab dish from snippets of their own skin -- a promising step toward helping people with a variety of diseases."

"Doctors hope the technique will someday offer a new source of arteries and veins for diabetics with poor circulation and heart-bypass or dialysis patients..."

"The method doesn't involve stem cells, And therefore is not politically or ethically contentious."

"Scientists from Cytograft Tissue Engineering Inc., a San Francisco Bay-area biotechnology company, reported on it Tuesday at an American Heart Association conference."

"We think this is extraordinarily promising. We think that there are a number of patients who would benefit from tissue-engineered vessels," said Dr. Elizabeth Nabel, director of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, which has poured $2.5 million into the tiny company's work."

"People with certain chronic conditions, such as dialysis patients, often run out of healthy vessels."

"Growing them involves taking a piece of skin and a vein, less than a quarter-inch square, from the back of the hand. It's placed in a lab dish and nurtured with growth enhancers that help it produce substances such as collagen and elastin, which give tissues their shape and texture."

"Two types of tissue are grown: one that forms the tough structure, or backbone, of the vessel and another that lines it and helps it to function."

"Sheets of this tissue are produced -- "You can cover your desk with a sheet," said Todd McAllister, a scientist and co-founder of the company -- and then stacked and rolled into sheets six to eight inches long. "This takes six to nine months, but development should be possible once ways are found to do the work on a commercial scale," said NIcholas D'Heureux, the company's chief scientific officer who invented the method."

"Still, that means that only patients whose needs are known th at far ahead of time could be considered."

"The focus now is on diabetics who need dialysis machines to filter wastes from their blood because their failing kidneys no longer can. They number 285,000 in the United States and double that worldwide."

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"In an accompanying drawing there is a statement that "The molded tissue replaced shunts in two kidney dialysis patients."

I have read quite a bit about stents and shunts, and their complications ensuing from the use of them. They are an immense help and scientists are improving them all the time. But they do still have faults. Perhaps using "home grown" stents will be the answer for now.

Who knows now just how far this sort of development can bring about in health science and human welfare ?

And so in the morning we are off to Oregon to spend Thanksgiving with our daughter and her family, hope to be back here around the fourth of December, will post from there.

Only time can give us that answer. But to this man here this is evidence of PROGRESS INDEED . . . . . . . . . . .

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