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Finnish Patient Gets New Jaw from His Own Stem Cells
An anonymous reader writes with news out of Finland, where a patient's upper jaw was replaced with bone cultivated from stem cells and grown inside the patient himself. We discussed other advances in stem cell research a few months ago. Quoting:
"In this case they identified and pulled out cells called mesenchymal stem cells -- immature cells than can give rise to bone, muscle or blood vessels. When they had enough cells to work with, they attached them to a scaffold made out of a calcium phosphate biomaterial and then put it inside the patient's abdomen to grow for nine months. The cells turned into a variety of tissues and even produced blood vessels, the researchers said."
I have no doubt that Bill Gates has had himself cloned, or at least all his organs and tissues, for when his own parts wear out. Stashed around the world, as insurance against laws banning cloning.
And if it's not viable yet, they'll just keep cloning him until they get it right.
I know that if I had $100B, that's how I'd spend it.
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make install -not war
Don't click link. Page has nasty javascript and is not related to the article one bit!
Lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine.
This is just a scientific trial, and they have social healthcare in Finland, so it didnt cost him a penny.
There is no such thing as an "upper jaw." We have various bones forming the base of the skull and associated teeth structures (aka maxilla) and a lower jaw (aka mandible).
Dentists have been using stem cells for years. In certain situations when there are not enough bone to place dental implants, dentists would place bonegrafts mixed in with blood drawn from the hip marrow. You get around 5-10 stem cells for every million blood cells but that's all it takes to convert the bonegraft into the patient's own bone (the stem cells become osteoblasts). The only difference in this study versus what we have been doing is that they place the bonegraft with stem cells into the stomach for osteoconduction versus us placing the material into place right off the bat. Typical wait times for us is only 6 months before the bone is deemed solid enough for implant placement.
Just to make you feel more comfortable, it's called embryonic, not fetal cell stem research. They call them embryos on the earliest stages of growth, generally from the moment of fertilization until the end of the 8th week of gestational age. They call them fetuses thereafter. The embryos used for harvesting human embryonic stem cells are typically four or five days old. They look like a hollow microscopic ball of cells and called the blastocyst.