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Successful Stem Cell Replacement of Windpipe
thepacketmaster writes "In what is being hailed as a medical milestone, CNN reports a woman suffering from long-term tuberculosis had her lower trachea and bronchial tube replaced by tissue grown from her own stem cells. A team from the universities of Barcelona, Spain; Bristol, England; and Padua and Milan, Italy, decided to go ahead with the surgery instead of having to remove her left lung. The operation, reported Wednesday in the British medical journal The Lancet, has been hailed as a major leap for medicine that could offer new hope for patients suffering from serious illness."
I just feel like I should point this out before someone decides to go on a rant about embryonic SC.
Adult Stem Cells : Lots
Embryonic Stem Cells : 0
No rejection and lots of progress. This is really great news.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
The first 3 comments are all about how adult stem cells seem to actually have ready potential, instead of about how embryonic stem cells would have been so much better (which used to happen in the other 5 articles a lot). Can the world catch up now?
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FTA:
While this procedure still does require a donor organ, it basically only uses the donor as a collagen framework to grow the patient's cells into.
Could the next step be fabricating the collagen frame, perhaps through 3D printing?
Your mind is clear / The things that you fear / Will fade with how much you / Believe what you hear
I found this part at least as interesting as the stem cells:
To create the new windpipe, the team took a seven-centimeter (2.75-inch) segment of trachea from a 51-year-old who had died. Over a six-week period, the team then removed all the cells from the donor trachea, because those cells could lead to rejection of the organ after transplant.
All that remained of the donor's stripped-down trachea was a matrix of collagen, a sort of scaffolding onto which the team then put Castillo's own stem cells -- along with cells taken from a healthy part of her trachea.
So there's still a donor involved, but there's less risk of rejection. We're still a ways from growing sophisticated organs from scratch, but this is an interesting implementation detail.
Somehow, I figured lonely slashdotters would be more interested in this article: Using Stem Cells for Breast Enhancement
... which frankly, strikes me as dangerous. If they're replicating stem cells from people who are already at high risk of breast cancer, doesn't that increase it even more (more generations == shorter telomeres)?
-l
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So what you're saying is, I can print out my new and improved wang frame, coat it with my special sauce, wait a month or so, and then take it with me to the doctor's office to get it installed?
I think you should probably wait until after it's installed to worry about coating it with your special sauce.
What? Oh. Never mind.
Can stem cells used to re-grow lost tooth?
don't lobby congress like mad to get stem cell research going in high gear.
replacing a pancreas will be a lot cheaper then treating diabetes for 40 years.
Same thing with any organ.
I predict Heart surgery could become out patient.
Oh, he has heart disease, we can spend 5000 a year treating it, or 10 grand to replace it.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
What is wrong with it then?
Please, enlighten me as to why it is "sickening, the devils work, EVIL!".
Note: if these are your "reasons", don't bother replying, because those aren't reasons.
The person who submitted this story should have linked to this one... http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/health/2008/11/19/lah.eod.japan.stem.cell.cnn?iref=videosearch This one is a video talking about how Japanese doctors used stem cells to grow breast tissue for implants. IMO, this is a WAY more significant. And interesting. And stimulating...
> Of course you have to acknowledge that embryonic stem cells are different and may provide viable treatments in areas where adult stem cells won't work for some reason.
We have many proven cases of adults stem cells being superior (because of rejection and because they're partially differentiated and therefore less likely to cause nasty things like teratomas).
While I'm willing to acknowledge that they might be a superior treatment, I would need medical evidence before making that conclusion.
As best I can tell, the only thing they're better at is what they can differentiate into. And that's a severe disadvantage for any treatment I've seen proposed.
Do you have any actual evidence that embryonic stem cells are better at curing people? Do you have any treatments where, in spite of rejection problems, embryonic stem cells are preferred to adult stem cells? Or am I supposed to accept the supposition that they might be better in place of evidence?
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Women neighbours: [on wall] If a sperm is wasted
Children: God get quite irate.
Priest: [in church] Every sperm is sacred.
Bride, Groom: Every sperm is good.
Nannies: Every sperm is needed
Cardinals: [in prams] In your neighbourhood!
Children: Every sperm is useful / Every sperm is fine
Funeral Cortege: God needs everybody's.
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Lady Mourner: And mine!
Corpse: And mine!
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
They're all very old! You'd think those guys would be at the front of the line to get some new organs grown. Of course, the only reason we don't have a more-or-less perpetual government of the same people is because they haven't. It's bad enough that we have to put up with some of them for upwards of 30 years...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
> Without the embryonic research, the state of the art may have never progressed to the point where embryonic cells are not needed.
Actually, the ban on using ESCs is probably what pushed the ASC treatment to this level. At the outset, scientists were always claiming that ESCs were better because they were fully undifferentiated and they were most eager to study those. But once they needed a replacement, they turned to ASCs and research since then has shown them to be the superior treatment option because they aren't rejected by the body the way ESCs are and because they don't have the same proclivity to cause tumors the way ESCs do.
So you should thank them for putting science on the right track. No matter what actors like Reeve may claim, we're years closer to actual cures thanks to this than we would be if we wasted all our time on ESCs, when none of that research has lead to promising treatments.
Now that is an interesting point. I unfortunately do not know enough on the issue to conjecture. I don't know how likely the stem cells are to "wear out early."
I'm going to have to do some reading up on this when I get some free time. Thanks for raising the point.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I have been listening to this story being hyped in the news all day, but it doesn't deserve quite that much attention. While this is a "great case" that most surgeons would appreciate, and a great outcome for the patient, the CNN report (and NPR and others) does what lay media generally do with medical reports - over-dramatize yesterday's news. This is an evolutionary case based on established surgical technologies which have been validated over the past 12 years, not a revolutionary implementation of new science. And regardless if you have any thoughts or opinions about embryonic stem cell research, this is not an embryonic case, it is just the use of autogenous cells to repopulate a regenerative biomatrix.
This is the "new surgery" of the 21st century, a move toward live engineering of living tissues rather than using alloplastic implants. Much of this new surgery is done strictly in situ, inserting an implant, and letting pluripotential cells circulating through the host find the implant and then reorganize themselves into a mature tissue. This works well with connective tissue matrices that will support the ingrowth of "connective tissue cells" derived from the embryonic mesoderm. The items available to surgeons are manufactured matrices such as Integra (Integra Life Sciences, New Jersey), and cadaveric matrices, usually dermis (of human, bovine, porcine, and equine origin, eg from LifeCell, Ethicon, TEI Biosciences, et al). Simply put, we implant these materials to reconstruct dermis, fascias, ligaments, and various skeletal and mesenchymal structures, and human host cells find them and make new living dermis-fascia-ligaments-etc. This works extremely well for reconstruction of skin and musculoskeletal structures. Not much progress has been made yet on the generation of glands and organs (which require function specific epithelial or ecto-entodermal cells).
These technologies and procedures have been a part of regular surgical practice since about 1996. Make no mistake about it - the tracheo-bronchial reconstruction you read about is a great case, but it is just a progressive implementation of existing concepts and methods to a wider range of diseases and indications. There will be more and more and more of this is the coming decades. In fact, existing regenerative materials could have easily made a new trachea-like conduit, avoiding the need for a human anatomical gift or organ donation, except for one thing . . .
The trachea and bronchi need a special architecture to avoid collapse. Because of the Bernoulli principle, these conduits could collapse during inspiration, so nature prevents that by having these pipes surrounded by semi-rigid cartilage rings. Regenerated cadaveric dermis by itself will not work. So instead, these guys used a donated trachea for its gross architecture and mechanical integrity, processed it in the same way that dermal matrices are processed to get rid of cells and immunogens, and then they seeded some host cells, then let it grow in situ. In actuality, the seeding step was largely irrelevant. When collagen-aminoglycan matrices (decellularized cadaveric materials) are implanted, circulating stem cells find them automatically. Pre-seeding could speed up the process by a week or so, but no big deal.
The cells which were seeded were NOT embryonic stem cells. They were just autogenous random marrow cells, some of which will be pluripotential, and able to regenerate tissues according to an embryonic model of tissue histogenesis. Note too that even if these were embryonic omnipotent stem cells, there is no such thing as a tracheal cell. What they implanted was a connective tissue matrix, generated by, and then repopulated by two and only two types of cells: fibroblasts and vascular cells. This is the supporting structure of all organs and tissues. Think of it like reinforced concrete. You can use cement and rebar to make a bridge, a road, a building, and so on, all with different shapes, loads, and functions, but it's all just cement and rebar.