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Grow Your Own Replacement Bones
Tim writes "New Scientist reports on a German man who had a complete jaw transplant, after having his cancerous jawbone removed nine years ago. The twist? This jawbone was grown on his shoulder, using a titanium mold, bone marrow, and recombinant bone morphogenic protein." There's also a BBC story.
Still, the amount of pain associated with getting broken bones means that I doubt there'll be anyone willing to abuse this system!
Note to M1-ers: a curt but otherwise insightful message is not "Flamebait" or "Troll".
A boxer with a glass-chin can be knocked out quite easily, but what about one with a titanium-chin?
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They didn't explain why they would have to go back later and remove the titanium scaffold. People have titanium hips, vertabrae, skull plates, and teeth--how come those don't have to be removed?
Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a soportar Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a espabilar
Just to show you how some people can never be pleased, the guy complains to his doctor that because he has no teeth he has to cut it into such small pieces that by the time he gets to the end of the steak, it's cold.
Reminds me of the story that was related to me the other night by someone on IRC. They knew someone whose kids found $200K in a bag and was eventually given control of the money since no one claimed it.
The person spent the money on a house and 2 Jeeps and then later complained that they'd wish they could get a break in life.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
of why stem cell research needs further capitalization. We are scratching the surface of what stem cells can really do for us! Hopefully Bush will read this article and wake up. Science and technology are the only initiatives (right now) that will push mankind forward.
Need a liver transplant? No problem, here is one we already made for you. Lung? Spleen? No problem. And now, we apparently have the technology to make the body grow bones of any shape we like and to surgically put those back in the body. That's unbelievably cool.
And, because all of these things are genetically identical to the recipient of the transplant, there is no kind of rejection problem at all.
I don't think it'll be that far down the road before "transplants" are a thing of the past. All organ/tissue replacement will be made for an individual.
-- "A chicken is an egg's way of making another egg."
CT-scan pics and location where jaw was grown are shown...
t ra nsplant.ap/index.html
http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/science/08/27/jaw.
(looks a little like lockjaw)
From start to end, the bone-replacement procedure took four weeks.
If muscles can be kept from atrophying in that amount of time, you could probably replace long bones like those found in arms and legs.
That'd be cool...
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In a few weeks I am having a spinal fusion surgery to repair my back. My L3 vertebrae is broken completely in two and there is a half inch gap between my spine.
I was given the choice of having bone matter placed in me from a dead person or using my own bone marrow. Well duh! Which choice did I take?
They are going to put two titanium tubes drilled with many small holes in between the two vertebrae then fill them with a mixture of my bone marrow and this BMP material or something very much like it. The mixture will spawn new bone growth and cause the two vertebrae to grow (or fuse) into one large vertebrae. Titanium rods and screws will hold it all together while it grows, which could take anywhere from one year to two years.
This is from an injury that occurred about 37 years ago and degenerated over time from a fracture to the point of total failure of the bone. I'm told that it's a GOOD thing that it just now is coming to light because of these new procedures, otherwise had they found it when I was a child, spinal surgical procedures in those days were barbaric and had a low success rate. They say this new method has better than a 95% success rate, with the 5 percent failure due to people not doing as told afterwards.
The article doesn't say anything about muscles...I'm still curious what they atteched to the jawbone.
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I was born with conjenital dislocation of the hips, which successively degraded over the years so that I had to have both hips replaced with artificial ones in 1995 at the age of 31. Although these artificial hips have been very good, I have to be careful about my weight and that I don't do jarring kinds of sports or lift heavy weights. I would have given a lot for this kind of implant to replace my degraded hips.
Perhaps in the future...
Here's a guy who is gradually turning himself into a tiger. For real ...
This sort of news always reminds me of the book Neuromancer. Makes me think of all the crazy modifications people get done to themselves in that book... it seems like we're always getting one step closer to the book's fictional ideas becoming reality (which in my opinion is both good and bad).
:D
I'm still anxiously awaiting a true 'matrix' as depicted in the book!
As one who raised his hand to the "auto-fallatio" question on the purity test, it's not the neck muscles that are the problem. Heck, your vertebre don't come into question at all; you just need a fairly flat stomach, strong abdominal muscles, and flexible back muscles.
A long dick doesn't hurt, either.
It's been a long time, though.
While it is cool that they can do this, I hope it leads to more complicated things like joints being grown to the right shape
You can create joints grown to the right shape. You can create Rapid Prototyping Models of bones from CT scans. You can have CT scans of bones exported to a format called DICOM which you can then have converted to a file format called STL, used in Rapid Prototyping. In your case, you could probably get a CT Scan of your other wrist in DICOM format, and have the STL mesh flipped to be a mirror image.
There are some services that can provide conversion software, or do the file conversions, as well as provide the RP models, although the models are made through stereolythography from what I gather. There are newer methods of creating rapid prototyping models that use the same STL file format, that are probably more precise.
You can obtain some software packages that let you do the conversion yourself, and although there is probably a bit of a learning curve, the biggest problem would be the price. It would be best to just let the services handle the conversion and you choose which Rapid Prototyping method to use.
From this point, you can use the model to construct a titanium mold, which could then be used to produce actual bone. And as for cartilege for the joint, the Carticel cartilege growth and transplant procedure could probably be applied. The FDA has approved Carticel for the knees and hips, but it would be up to a doctor's discretion to apply it in other ways.
I haven't heard of anyone doing this so I'm sure it is more complicated than a bunch of file conversion routines but nonetheless it is interesting.
They are doing it, just not with bone yet. Check out the the case studies. The models are either being used for surgical planning, or for implant design. I actually first saw this sort of thing years ago, on a documentary, showing how they used stereolithography to create a piece of skull to exactly fit a hole some guy had in his skull, and they implanted it.
The file conversion procedure involves converting a massive amount of raster data (DICOM) to vector data (STL). This requires some manual intervention to do things like segmentation (isolating the proper body part) and patching up flaws that the conversion process couldn't handle. Some bone layers were too thin to automatically be recognised, so there were a few holes, and metal artifacts like braces cause after-images in CT scans that have to manually be edited out for the STL mesh.
You'd be surprised at where the technology is now. I have a jaw problem, so I went and got a CT scan done where I got the results on a CD rather than film. The viewer on the CD was for Windows, so I was unable to view it on my PowerBook. I came across a fantastic free (GPL) program called OsiriX which runs on OS X 10.3 (Panther). With this, I was able to view 3D images of my skull and jaw on my laptop. The site even lets you download example DICOM data to try out with the program. For DICOM viewers on other platforms, you can check out IDoImaging.com
And I'm actually in the process of having DICOM data converted to STL by Simpleware.co.uk and will have a model made with a Z Corp 3D printer. I just sent them the CT Scan DICOM data by FTP, and they are in the process of converting it to STL, which I will retrieve by FTP. Then I'll FTP it over to the local RP service with a 3D Printer, and they'll post the model over to me in a parcel.
I wrote the C code inside a robotic limb lengthening machine and was able to attend many surgeries and see patient progress over time.
The basic principle is simple... break a leg and tug on it by 1 millimeter per day, and the body will fill in the gap with new bone.
The technique is called the Ilizarov technique after the Russian who discovered it. You can see in those pictures that a mechanical frame takes the place of your broken bone during the "stretching" phase. The leg is broken, but the frame keeps you able to walk nearly normal.
The most amazing operation I saw was a guy who blew away his entire tibia/fibula with a shotgun, but didn't overly destroy the blood vessels and nerves and muscle of the lower leg. They bolted one of these frames on, compressed his ankle and foot up just 4" from his knee, waited a few days for the bone to knit, and then grew him a new tibia over the course of 6 months.
You can make ANYONE taller using this technique, at about 1 inch per month.
The Russians used wrenches to turn their bolts 4 times a day, elongating the metal frame by 1/4 mm four times per day, for the 1mm total. Our device (the autogenesis device) used Intel microcontrollers and stepper motors geared down enormously, so that we elongated the frame over 1000 times per day by less than a micron each move. The result was more natural looking nerves, blood vessels, (which are also grown by this technique), the body likes the gradual movements better.
You can do all kinds of crazy stuff with this technique. One of the first patients was an Atlanta Falcons player who had one leg lengthened by a small amount and also had the foot rotated by a few degrees (again, a very small amount each day) to correct an improperly healed injury.
The fact is that he's not. He is against stem cell harvesting from aborted fetuses.
He's against stem cell harvesting from left over embryos from in-vitro fertilization, which he supports wholeheartedly.
Understandably, Republicans are frothing themselves into spinland because it's a very unpopular stance, one that they themselves might disagree with. But since they can't ever criticize Bush, they have to do all sorts of mental gymnastics to convince themselves that he's not actually doing anything stupid.
You'd rather extract bone marrow from a living adult (with all the possible complications this might cause) instead of using an embryo that is either dead or unable to survive anyway.