Tissue Engineering - Turbo

BBC NEWS | Health | New tissue 'grown within minutes'

Currently, scientists make tissues to be used for
operations such as skin grafts by building a scaffold of cells that
grow in the lab.

However, it can take between one and 12 weeks to grow enough of the required tissue for the surgery.

Sucking out the water using a technique called plastic compression meant they could make the collagen in just over half an hour.

Its success in these applications will depend on how
it is survives in the body and how it is remodelled by natural body
processes.

"It also needs to be known whether it can act as a
template that is replaced by normal functional tissue. The present work
provides a good experimental basis for these further studies.

This is great news, this should help in the recovery from almost any
kind of injury if this can be used to repair real tissue. I think this
would have a major impact on burn victims, but everyone would benefit.

Technorati Tags: tissue engineering

Kick starting stem cells

ANSA.it - News in English - New stem-cell method fixes hearts
This makes me wonder, if this gets such amazing results, why isn't this response used by the body to recover from injuries in the first place? That, and why didn't someone think of this sooner? Whatever works though, if there is some adverse affect from this kind of therapy, we'll be able to overcome it down the road as we become more fluent in the language of biochemistry. If this technique gets more people to escape velocity, more power to it.

Technorati Tags: stem cells, regenerative medicine, cytochines, heart attack

Cellular lineage trees

Lineage trees for cells
While it may be interesting to trace every cell back, I'm not sure we would really gain much in the way of insight to what is proposed in the article. We have models for cancer development, and we know how to get stem cells and what their uses are, so I don't think this research is going to gain much.

Technorati Tags: aging, cancer, stem cells

Aging telltale?

Newswise | WVU Aging Research ‘For the Birds’

It would seem that since this compound accumulates with age, and the faster it accumulates, the shorter the lifespan, it would be a good idea to prevent this accumulation, and to find out how to prevent it's formation. It would be interesting to see if this had a beneficial effect on lifespan.

Technorati Tags: aging, pentosidine, birds, glycation

Long Road for stem cells?

CNN.com - 'Long road' for stem cell research - Oct 24, 2005
this is more linear thinking on the part of a lot of people here. I think that everyone but a very limited few don't see that the growth of technology is exponential. I think that we're going to see real improvements in the are of stem cells and tissue engineering a lot faster than most people realize. I'd say that we're going to be able to replace every organ but the brain with the next 15 years using a patients own stem cells to tissue engineer new ones, and that may even be too conservative.

Technorati Tags: stem cell, exponential growth, Ray Kurzweil

Stem Cell Legislation

Roundtable Decries Senate Efforts to Fast-Track Stem Cell Legislation

Good to see the citizens taking some responsibilty and not letting the government pull the wool over their eyes for a change. The Ohio Roundtable and Freedom Forum are on the right track, stem cell technology is important, and it's moral implications need to be fully thought out by the community that the laws are going to affect before politicians try to twist the issue to buy themselves the fringe votes.

Technorati Tags: stem cell, legislation

A*Star to consolidate stem cell research in Singapore

Channelnewsasia.com

I'm not sure if this is good news or not. I suppose they may get some efficiency out of it, but they won't really have any competition. I guess they will get some internation competition at some point, and I'd like to think that it would be from the U.S., but that would be dreaming.

Technorati Tags: singapore, stem cell

Murder Death?

The Chronicle: 10/28/2005: The Man Who Would Murder Death
Aubrey is sure getting some publicity these days, and it appears to be getting less negative, at least IMO.

Technorati Tags: Aubrey de Grey, aging, regenerative medicine

Adult Stem Cells

TCS: Tech Central Station - Raise a Glass to Adult Stem Cells

Wow, right after i posted on this I read another article on the subject, detailing success with liver, heart, and even spinal injuries, and this with adult stem cells, the ones that aren't causing controversy. Progress is coming at a good clip. Ray Kurzweil must be proud.

Klotho

- Forbes.com

Forbes is reporting on the discovery that Klotho, a hormone that regulates calcium uptake by cells, appears to extend life. It would appear that production of the hormone declines as we age, thus causing things like osteoporosis and general aging due to negative calcuim balance. Klotho, however, is not the protein that affects calcium balances, so there may be more to the story, but as we get more details on how proteins and the body works, we'll be able to fine tune these kind of things, and supplement as needed when the body stops making what it needs to.

Technorati Tags: anti-aging, klotho, calcium

Stem Cells

The Globe and Mail: Coaxing bones to grow anew

We're seeing more and more of this kind of discovery: heart, bones, skin. It won't be long before we have something like islet cells of the pancrease that will actually cure type 1 diabetes. We'll also be able to grow replacement organs for ones that have been damaged, like the liver, kidneys, gall bladder, you name it, we'll be able to grow one from your own stem cells and replace the worn out one. The only problematic organ will be the brain, and what we'll probably end up doing with that is implanting stem cells cultured in the lab harvested from our own bodies into our brains in order to replace dying brain cells. That probably means some kind of upper limit to what we can store in there without some kind of external augmentation, or radical change to our genome.

Technorati Tags: stem cells, bone, regeneration

Personalizing medical treatment

Via EurekAlert!, electrical engineers are working on personalizing medical treatment.  I find this to be an excellent development, as anytime someone with an engineering bent starts working on a problem, we usually see good progress in the field.   I think one of the current problems with medicine today is that it is almost treated as an art.  I read a couple of weeks ago about a study done in Chicago on how implementing quality control measures, i.e. checklists and things of that nature, would greatly benefit the outcomes of cardiac patients, as the study found that in a number of instances that people forgot to do things needed for a better outcome for the patient.  Now this is not necessarily the fault of the doctors or nurses, as people in this profession are currently very over-worked, but having something as simple as a checklist to go by would prevent this kind of error.  While it would seem to be impersonal, and most patients like the personal touch, it's stupid not to do something that works.  Yet again, we could learn a lot in this area from what the Japanese taught us in the automobile industry 50 years ago.

This would apply to "personalizing" medicine as well, as the personalization part just means that the treatments that apply to your particular condition are applied, but the QA/QC controls should still be in place in how we determine what exactly your condition is, and then what treatments are applied once that is known.

How Cutting Calories May Increase Longevity

Articles like this piss me off.  While on the cover, this looks like a positive article on WebMD about how practicing CR may increase lifespan, it goes into detail about a "study" done by John Phelan, PhD of UCLA.  Their bottom line: Severely cutting calories might extend human life a little bit, but not much, and the sacrifice likely wouldn't be worth it. The report appears in Ageing Research Reviews.

"rats in longevity studies got so few calories that they could no longer reproduce. The rats simply didn't have enough energy to breed and rear the next generation.

That saved the rats a lot of effort. Without the wear and tear of parenting, their bodies got a break, and they lived longer.

But people are different. They don't give birth to litters of babies per pregnancy or reproduce as often as rats.

So even if someone starved themselves enough to shut down fertility -- and stayed that way throughout adulthood -- they wouldn't live much longer than their well-fed peers, Phelan's team reasoned."

Yes, that's sound reasoning if I've ever heard it.  Let's just study one of the things that are different between rats and people, the fact that rats breed much more often, and focus on that in our study and toss out all of the known benefits of CR.  Oh, and while we're at it let's also forget that CR has been studied in other higher simians, and been shown to increase their lifespan by up to 30%.

On the positive note, the article did discuss that some progress is being made in determining what about caloric restricting is causing the benefit.  Hopefully we will be able to come up with a mimetic soon, so we don't have to practice CR in order to live longer.

Nanobombs for cancer

Scientists develop cancer nanobomb

"[Panchapakesan] believes the nanobomb holds great promise as a therapeutic agent for killing cancer cells, with particular emphasis on breast cancer cells, because its shockwave kills the cancerous cells as well as the biological pathways that carry instructions to generate additional cancerous cells and the small veins that nourish the diseased cells. Also, it can be spread over a wide area to create structural damage to the cancer cells that are close by."

This is the kind of wonderful things we should expect to see in the future from the intersection of biotechnology and nanotechnology.   As the biotechnology industry adds to their knowledge base of how the human body works, and the nanotechnology industry develops greater capabilities of creating medical nanobots, these two fields together have the potential to be a great boon to all mankind, with the potential to cure all diseases.  Of course there is also the possibility of their misuse, which could cause greater destruction than any nuclear war ever could.  Just imagine dispersing a cloud of this over a city, then activating them.  This is probably the most crude and least destructive thing that you can do with nanotechnology.

Good news from Thailand

An article from Hype and Hope:

"Completion of this large-scale facility will open a new era of stem cell therapy. “We see a future where our facilities are able to serve demand for all cellular products world-wide,” commented Fulga, “the need for cord banking and bone marrow harvesting should virtually disappear overnight once everyone has ready access to their own stem cells through a simple blood donation. This follows our basic mission to make stem cell therapy cost-effective and available to all.”"

This is what we can do with gene therapy when there isn't a stifling body like the FDA over-regulating everything.  Of course this is bad news for all those cord blood banks out there.

Gene Therapy

Science Daily posted an article yesterday on permanent gene therapy  I think this kind of treatment is going to become more and more commonplace as we discover the genetic basis for chronic diseases.  This has the potential to become a cure for a lot of debilitating diseases that right now we can do almost nothing for.  I think this is really going to start getting interesting when we are able to create new proteins that do a better job than the ones evolution has bequeathed upon us, and we can put the gene sequences for these better proteins into our DNA.  This has great potential for life extension as we will be able to come up with better free radical scavengers, better DNA repair mechanisms, better proteins for removing AGEs, and on and on.  This kind of therapy could also be augmented with medical nanobots, which could assist with diseases that aren't caused by underlying genetics, but by invasion or exposure to harmful chemicals.  Alas, to this date we only have caloric restriction to extend our lives, and maybe cryonics to preserve us if we don't make it to escape velocity.

Aging is not something that just happens...

The Pittsburg Post-Gazette has run an article on Dr. Cynthia Kenyon's work with manipulating C. Elegans gene equivalent of the human IGF-1 gene, and produced roundworms that live 6-10 times longer than normal. The article states that "Aging doesn't occur simply because parts wear out, but also because our genetic code is programmed to reduce the body's repair work after a certain age." Does not the last part of the sentence contradict the the assertion of the first part? If the body stops repairing itself, then it's parts simply wear out. Well, we'll let them off on that little bit of semantics, since this has the potential of greatly increasing human lifespan. I don't see that this as contraditory to any of Dr. Aubrey de Grey's suppositions for SENS, as what is accomplished by "tweaking" the daf-2 gene in c. elegans is basically enhancing/extending the repair of our parts, which is the presumption behind SENS: to repair, replace, or prevent our bodies from wearing out. I forsee some complementary research going on, one side being to enhance or extend the body's own repair mechanisms, and the other being to use external means to protect or repair our body parts with external means, and replace them if necessary.

SENS

Looks like some progress is being made toward implementing Aubrey de Grey's SENS.  Someone has successfully transferred the codon for some Mitochondrial DNA into the nucleus of a cell, and had the proteins expressed.  There is still some work to be done to fully implement this step, the proteins have to get into the mitochondria to be used, but it's a good step.

Why idiots like this?

Lingering Longer: Who Will Care?

Someone please tell me why idiots like Leon Kass get all the media coverage about aging, when they apparently know nothing about the point of healthy life extension?  That or they are actively trying to misguide people for some reason I can't fathom.  The point is not to extend the portion of your life where you are old and feeble, but to extend the healthy years you have, and minimize, or even eliminate any time spent in frailty!  Someone tell me why this guy gets the the media attention, and Aubrey de Grey gets almost none?  If we're ever going to get anywhere with funding for research into how to prevent aging, then we need to address these kinds of mis-perceptions that a number of people for some reason want to perpetuate to the rest of the world.  If extending life meant extending only the frail time at the end, then how many would really want to do it?  What we're talking about though is not the extension of the end time, but stretching out everything in the middle, so you have a longer time when you are in your prime.  Ask people the question of would they want to live longer, but stipulate that it would be added to the time when they feel like they're in their 20's and see how many would say yes.