Scientists help bodies grow new organshttp://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200606/s1657549.htm
Breakthrough: Microsurgery is used to place the cells inside the body. [File photo] (ABC TV) A team of scientists and surgeons at a Melbourne hospital has developed a method of growing new organs within a patient's body.
Previously, scientists had only been able to create two-dimensional constructions such as skin.
But researchers at the Bernard O'Brien Institute of Microsurgery at Melbourne's St Vincent's Hospital say have created three-dimensional cells.
The cells have been grown in a plastic chamber under the patients' skin.
"We have developed a special chamber and this is essentially an empty box into which we implant a blood vessel using microsurgery techniques," lead researcher Professor Wayne Morrison said.
"We let them grow according to the specific environment that we can create.
"Now currently we have been able to make breast tissue, fat, muscle, pancreas tissue that secretes insulin and we have also created thymus tissue, which may have an application in immunology."
Organ creation
Professor Morrison predicts the discovery will ultimately lead to the creation of human organs, including parts of the heart, using patients' own stem cells.
He says such a scenario would reduce the problem of immune rejection, which is often associated with organ transplants.
"This is really just an example of the potential of tissue engineering. This is growing tissues in the body," Professor Morrison said.
"It involves combining the expertise of biologists and chemical engineers, particularly where we mix cells and scaffolds together and implant them in the body where they grow and mature and develop into specific tissues."
The research team says it is expected to be about 10 years before the new method is used.
Costello's heart
Federal Treasurer Peter Costello was behind the original $300,000 grant that ultimately led to the discovery.
At the scientists' press conference, Mr Costello took the liberty of explaining why he had taken an interest in the research.
"So why is a Federal Treasurer interested in this work? First, my interest in the heart proves I have a heart."
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They were going the wrong way with stem cells research….dolly the sheep proved that…they used an old sheep to clone so the clones grew old too quickly and died too early….when they use people’s own cells then rejection isn’t a factor regardless of age…they should have known that earlier though for the simple fact that stored blood transfused from donors suffers the same fate, “rejection”…even your own blood, stored in advance is rejected by your body as your own body believes it to be a foreign body….. that is because the platelet’s change their shape, into spheres…..I went to a seminar about bloodless surgery at a hospital in East Fremantle, Western Australia several years back
http://www.fhhs.health.wa.gov.au/services/default.aspx?SiteID=4
I also hope you live to see it…and me too…
Everyone poo-hoos the Jehovah’s Witnesses, but they should have listened to them earlier on some subjects, especially health ones….I’m not talking about Christian fundies [who are loons], I’m talking about sound medical reasoning…the JW’s refusing blood got them to start looking for alternatives in that area, inturn they made huge advancements….
I’ll never forget that great movie about “Lorenzo’s Oil” either, and how two parents got themselves informed to help their own son. Doctors aren’t always right as that movie showed, but there are plenty of doctors and scientists who KNOW, they just KNOW what has to be done…so they’ll do it….It will just be slower than it could be and that is basically ego driven essentially….long story…lol
In Perth OZ, there is woman called Dr Fiona Wood….she invented the spray on skin for burns patients…using a person own skin cells to grow in Petri dishes and then spraying them on the wounds…it worked
http://clearlyexplained.com/news/nature/2005/jan/1N2601_2005.html
I had two msn groups…big ones…Avant-garde Philosophy and newstalback free speech….msn closed down but if we wanted to save our posts, we had to switch to “multiply” [they’re **** btw]…I did store them with multiply but only in the last couple of days have I been looking through old posts and news articles and that is why I am coming across good news articles about advancements in medicine…biology has always fascinated me….and I pay attention to it. No one else was very interested in the news articles I posted….too concerned with trolling and camming they were…lol
