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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".
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."
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.
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.
Interesting. I'm thinking a bit further ahead, though.
Can we grow *DIFFERENT* bones than we have now? I wouldn't mind longer legs (statistically, being taller means being treated better, getting a better salary, and all sorts of social perks).
Moreso, can we grow, say, digigrade running legs so I can get a 30 mph stride? How about growing new, hyper-extensible joints that don't get arthritis, don't dislocate painfully, and can turn anyone into a contortionist?
-Hentai [in vita non pacem est]
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.