Yeah, I've been slacking. The drinking and driving thread finally got me motivated enough to post these.
It's been shown that stem cells can improve a serious spinal cord injury. Now reports of other goodness is coming in. If certain "alphabet agencies" would get out of the way, I'm sure that girl could have new skin and muscles in almost no time at all.
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Man's heart repaired with muscle taken from his leg
07.02.2003
11.45am - By JEREMY LAURANCE
A 72-year-old Frenchman has become the first patient to have his failing heart successfully repaired with muscle taken from elsewhere in his body.
Surgeons used muscle cells from the man's leg to replace an area of the heart that had been damaged because of a severe heart attack. The operation was done at France's flagship hospital, the Georges Pompidou in Paris, in June 2000 but it was not publicised until the patient died recently. It could open the way to new treatments for patients with heart failure that would avoid the need for a heart transplant.
The patient, whose heart muscle had lost part of its capacity to pump, first had a small sample of tissue taken from his thigh under local anaesthetic. The tissue was grown in culture in the laboratory and muscle stem cells were extracted. Two weeks later the patient had a conventional coronary bypass operation, during which 33 separate injections of the stem cells grown from his thigh muscle were made into his heart. The cells were injected into the area of muscle that had been damaged by the earlier attack and no longer functioned.
Five months later the man's health had improved and tests showed that the scarred area of the heart where the injections were made was functioning again. After 18 months the man died of a stroke unrelated to his heart failure, and the surgeons examined his heart post mortem. This showed that the stem cells transplanted from his leg had grown into new heart muscle with a "preserved contractile structure", which suggested that it had been functioning.
Writing in The Lancet, Professor Albert Hagege and colleagues say: "These results lend support to the usefulness of [this] therapy in a clinical setting [and] suggest that grafts have long-term viability ... to sustain a cardiac workload over time."
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Med-Tech » An experimental stem-cell therapy used to revive damaged heart tissue in a 16-year-old boy could transform the stem-cell debate as well as the therapeutic-cloning controversy.
Developing in "Wired"
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posted 03-13-2003 03:45
