Slashdot Mirror
The Mass Production of Living Tissue
An anonymous reader sends in this moderately disturbing quote from Gizmodo:
"I'm touching a wet slab of protein, what feels like a paper-thin slice of bologna. It's supple, slimy, but unlike meat, if you were to slice it down the center today, tomorrow the wound would heal. It's factory-grown living tissue. The company behind the living, petri-dish-grown substance known as Apligraf hates my new name for it: meat band-aid. 'It's living,' Dr. Damien Bates, Chief Medical Officer at Organogenesis, corrects me. 'Meat isn't living.' But no one argues with me that this substance is really just a band-aid. A living, $1500 band-aid, I should say. Apligraf is a matrix of cow collagen, human fibroblasts and keratinocyte stem cells (from discarded circumcisions), that, when applied to chronic wounds (particularly nasty problems like diabetic sores), can seed healing and regeneration. But Organogenesis is not interested in creating boutique organs for proof of concept scientific advancement. They're a business in the business of mass tissue manufacturing — and the first of its kind."
Many a SciFi story I've read has used this kind of thing for wounds. I wonder how soon until they have it to the point where these slices are vacuum packed and you can open it and stuff it into a wound in the field?
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
So when you rub your scars you induce swelling!
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
how does it taste?
...this tech will finally deliver fully realized COTS pornstar-branded vaginas. At which point the world will end.
So when do we start rolling terminators off the assembly lines?
This sounds like incredibly great news for burn victims, given development.
Pathological kinda promises Path + Logical - but instead, you get stuck with pathetic.
This sounds highly promising for traditionally traumatic and fatal wounds, particularly burns. It will be interesting to see if this product increases the rate of survival in burn victims and other similar traumas. You have to love modern medicine.
Wank off. We'll save $20
I don't get why this is news. This company and this product have been around for like 20 years.
Soylent Green is Wankers!
Table-ized A.I.
Band-Aid®?
Some days it's just not worth
chewing through my restraints.
The hospital in question was using disused foreskin to create eyelids for burn victims. Alas, they all turned out to be cock-eyed after the procedure!
Chopping up virgins' bits and pieces and turning it into a medical treatment!
Human horn is real!
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
but unlike meat, if you were to slice it down the center today, tomorrow the wound would heal.
Yeah, because there never even was a animal who cut itself, and where then the wound healed...
FAIL
That would be called a fleshwound. A wound to its flesh or tissues. Meat is the same tissue, but terminally locked into 'deadness'.
There is a difference.
Now, is this the new protein or the bologna?
Sounds like the first step to a T-800.
Sounds really promising for those who want to be cannibals. Just grow it using samples from your tastier friends (or from yourself, for the ultimate: survivable self-cannibalism). The price might have to come down a little, of course, or it will remain an expensive delicacy.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Apligraf is a matrix of cow collagen, human fibroblasts and keratinocyte stem cells (from discarded circumcisions)
I expected them to follow that list up with 'and a few other things'.
Screw 'meat bandaid', call it 'hotdog bandaid' instead.
There's no place like
against circumcision this is it.
I am not sure why this item was introduced as "moderately disturbing". If you will permit me, I will explain what it is, since I use it regularly. (I have no stock nor other biased affiliation with the company or product.) The product first came on the market in 1998, over 10 years ago. It has a well-established place in the treatment of chronic wounds. It is not the only product in the category of "living cell therapies" for chronic wounds. The other product is Dermagraft, similar, and likewise around for nearly 10 years. When Apligraf first came out, it was promoted as skin-graft-in-a-box. It is not. It is allogeneic material (recipients will reject it), and thus it does not "take" to the body like an autogenous skin graft. In its earliest years, when the company was promoting it as a skin graft, it got some high profile press because it was put to good use as readily available biological coverage for burn victims of the 9-11-2001 twin towers catastrophe. The company that makes it, Organogenesis, partnered with pharma giant Novartis for marketing and product management, and under them, they listened to customers who told them it was not skin grafts in a box, and they redefined its marketing for chronic wounds. The product management has been back in the hands of Organogenesis for about 3 or 4 years now.
The material is essentially a poly-pharmaceutical packaged in a living material. The raw materials come from donated foreskins. Extensive safety testing is done. Pure extracted fibroblasts are put into cell culture, where they do their business and re-form a collagen matrix equivalent to normal dermis. After that, pure keratinocytes are cultured on top of the dermis, and an epidermis forms. The product is shipped in its petri dish, as a circle of 44 sq cm area. The Gizmodo article shows a picture of it. As a living material, its procurement and handling are a bit different than most medical devices, but it is easy to get and apply.
The juvenile cells in the material make a broad spectrum of growth factors and other biochemicals which have a positive pro-proliferative effect on wounds. The role for this material is for chronic and pathological wounds. The company got its market approval and indications from the FDA for studies done on diabetic and venous ulcers, but the material is useful for chronic and pathological ("cap") wounds of any cause. Like anything else, it does not work for all wounds or patients, but it is fairly predictable, and its results can be rather dramatic. When a cap wound of whatever cause has been treated to the point that disease is quiet, inflammation is gone, and the wound should be healing but it is not, then that is when wound stimulatory therapies are applied. There are several available, and Apligraf has been one of the flagship products in this category for 10 years now. Many wounds which simply will not budge no matter what will take off and heal once this is applied.
Organogenesis has its first new product coming out soon, for oral mucosa and gingiva, so perhaps that is why they are trying to stir up some attention with articles like the one quoted. However, it is not Brave New World nor Coma nor any other meat factory. It is just on the leading edge of biological therapeutics in the 21st century. And if Slashdotters want to make lots of jokes as they often do, like "put Viagra in the petri dish to grow more", well, we've already heard them all.
(All very timely, since I just gave a presentation on this last week (and have been for 8 years). If you want to learn more, I posted a copy of the presentation on the website I use for posting talks and presentations and whatnot. This particular talk has a mix of my slides and company slides. It is NOT yet annotated with full text on each slide, so some will just be pictures and you will have to infer what you can, but text should be coming one of these days:
http://www.arimedica.com/content/arimedica_apligraf_(partially%20annotated)_2005-1006.pdf
Again, I have no investment nor bias here, I just use this stuff in practice because it works and it's an important product.)
Somehow I was reminded of this story:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8360569.stm
The Mohel's cat will be disappointed.
I had a friend who once thought of using cancer based tumors on cattle to make the most anti-PETA meat known to man.
This might finally change all the viagra spam.
New and improved "factory" model spam instead. It will be a sick, sick day the spam changes ...
...it's a real growth industry.
-- thinkyhead software and media
Apligraf is a matrix of cow collagen, human fibroblasts and keratinocyte stem cells (from discarded circumcisions), that, when applied to chronic wounds (particularly nasty problems like diabetic sores), can seed healing and regeneration.
Finally, a band-aid made out of human penises!
Can't believe I didn't think of it.
This game will waste your life. Don't clicky!
They should trademark it as "4Skin".
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091109173356.htm
I am very concerned about the ethical issues surrounding this. If you have any education in or respect for human rights this should raise all kinds of red flags. The notion of using *healthy* tissue harvested from *unconsenting*, helpless children for sale to manufacture products raises serious ethical concerns and questions. It is treating children and their bodies like objects, like agricultural products to be harvested and exploited for the benefit of others. This is nothing less than organ trafficking, no different than the harvesting of other body parts from a child for sale on the market. This technology is already illegal (as organ trafficking) in many countries. The whole notion is pretty inhumane.
Circumcision itself is unethical (destruction of a healthy part of a childs body, without the proper justification that is required for amputation, a serious or life threatening disease requiring immediate treatment which is present and current and cannot be treated by lesser invasive means), and this just adds to the unethical nature of it. Children are not livestock for their bodies to be treated like objects, to be cut up or harvested at a whim, they are human beings with independant rights of their own, one of the most basic is a right to a whole body and to not have their bodies cut up and mutilated by others. It is already technically classified as a battery under general legal principles applying to the rights of the person. The boys and their bodies deserve equal protection as girls already enjoy from such unnecessary genital mutilations. Male circumcision can be compared to female circumcision. In fact, common male circumcision is more invasive than many types of common female circumcision such as removal of the clitoral hood which removes less tissue than male circumcision. Obviously, if female circumcision were done in sterile conditions by doctors, even out of fears of diseases the child does not have, or that it is lesser invasive than other types of circumcision, does not make it acceptable, and the same standard should apply to boys.
The ends do not justify the means as we always say in ethics, and you cannot justify crimes no matter what your excuse is. You cannot justify fondling a child or cutting off a healthy part of their body based on some claimed benefit.
That gives a whole new meaning to the term "teabagging."
Duh...
Streisand Effect
"There ought to be limits to freedom." -George W. Bush
So what's the big deal, boys are going to be circumcised anyway, why not profit from it?
It's the profit motive that's the problem.
Parents report being pressured by hospital staff to circumcise their newborn sons. In fact, the anti-circumcision organization IntactAmerica.org was originally funded by couple in response to their disgust at having been pressured to have their boy cut.
Infant boys' foreskins may be very valuable to tissue engineering companies but they are more valuable and rightfully belong to the boys themselves.
Infant circumcision is an unnecessary amputation that cannot be refused by the prospective amputee himself. That makes it a forced amputation, a very serious human rights violation.
Circumcision advocates within the CDC are now pushing to get the agency to endorse circumcision as an HIV preventative. Sounds great, but if you read further there is no real claim of effectiveness. You still have to wear a condom if you want to be actually protected from infection. The circumcision-HIV experiment has already been conducted on a mass scale and the result was negative. America has the highest circumcision rate in the developed world and also the highest HIV rate. Perhaps that's why circumcision advocates are careful to say that you still need to wear a condom. Being cut is simply of no use in fighting HIV.
So why push parents to have their baby boy cut when it's not going to protect him from anything?
Follow the money. Amputating infant foreskins is a billion dollar business. And now someone else wants his foreskin, the tissue engineering companies.
The mass production of living tissue would be a fine development if it didn't depend on infant foreskins. Treating non-consenting minors as a source of spare parts violates our most basic ethical standards.
Because if they can grow spines and hearts then they are desperately needed in Washington D.C. stat!
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
That's ok think of the foresight they'll have!
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Those kind of objections would be generally irrelevant but damn they went for the trifecta here. Cows for the hindus, stem cells for the other morons and discarded circumcisions!! for the regular folk to be grossed out by.
"Solyent Green is Foreskins! Solyent Green is discarded Foreskins! No. Really. They collect them for the keratinocyte stem cells. It's all quite safe."
Doesn't have quite the same punch, but at least it's corrected for accuracy.
Allah be merciful! Is it Halal?
Can this be the start of the price of hamburger going way down? Meat without need for the cow, the chicken, or the turkey could be a boon to the entire world. It could also give us a use for all the abandoned factory space in America. Now if they can grow nice leather I could use some new upholstery.
where meat will be manufactured, correctly, without guilt of murder of organisms. A new imposed check will eventually be needed to fight the long-term medical consequences of artificial meat, with no warnings like climate change this time. Its better than the brutal past, of course, but tailored meat will make super soldiers even more attractive. The Sith Tradition is now born in full glory. ... The Matrix !!
The best presently known antidote to excesses in this direction is
Life just became a whole lot more complicated, guys.
Generally, by the time an animal is regarded as being meat, it is not alive...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Meat is the same tissue, but terminally locked into 'deadness'
It would appear that we are all undead.
You idiot, that's not the band-aid... that's the lunch meat!!!
Then what the hell did we have for lunch with the soup!!!