Breakthroughs in regenerative medicine have received quite a bit of attention on the web recently, with this particular story making the rounds several times. We linked to it back in March after 60 Minutes did a piece on it, although then (and today) our emphasis is more on Wake Forest University's efforts to grow human tissues and organs than the University of Pittsburgh's use of extracellular matrix to regrow body parts. Both are very exciting lines of research, but it was the latter that caught the attention of the BBC and ultimately the Volokh Conspiracy, who subsequently linked to this piece, wherein a "leading plastic surgeon," apparently after carefully viewing the entire 59-second BBC clip -- possibly more than once! -- declared the entire matter "junk science."

This assessment will no doubt come as a shock to the U. S. Army Institute of Surgical Research, who just awarded $42.5 million to Wake Forest and the University of Pittsburgh, in support of a "massive regenerative medicine project aimed at battlefield injuries." Apparently both of these institutions have been working on a number of "junk science" projects with the Department of Defense over the past few years, and the DOD now sees great potential in treating a wide variety of battlefield injuries, including:

Burn repair

Wound healing without scarring

Craniofacial reconstruction

Limb reconstruction, regeneration or transplantation

Compartment syndrome, a condition related to inflammation after surgery or injury that can lead to increased pressure, impaired blood flow, nerve damage and muscle death.

Here's hoping that this research yields significant relief and healing to patients who have suffered traumatic injuries on the battlefield.

Meanwhile, following up on our original piece on this subject, we recently caught up with Dr. Anthony Atala, the director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, and got some more information on his team's efforts to grow human tissues and organs, essentially "replacement parts" for the sick and injured. Here he talks about using inkjet printers to literally "print out" new tissues, and addresses the question of whether his research in regenerative medicine has implications for life extension research.

You've been quoted as saying that it is "just a matter of time" before someone grows a human heart. So let's start with the basic question -- how does one grow a heart? We've read how an artificially grown human bladder was recently implanted into a patient: that it was built using layers of tissue attached to a bladder-shaped scaffolding which eventually dissolved, leaving an intact organ in place. Will a human heart be built by similar means? If so, where do these layers of tissue come from? Are they grown from stem cells?

It’s hard to predict which form of regenerative medicine will eventually be used to help patients with damaged heart muscle. There is the possibility of injecting stem cells that will find their way to the damaged tissue as well as the approach of creating patches of the tissue in the lab that can be used to mend a poorly functioning organ. In many cases, you don’t need an entire new heart to dramatically improve the patient’s life. It may be possible to change a patch of non-functional tissue the same way you change a malfunctioning heart valve. Our interest isn’t specifically to build a human heart, but to make patients better – no matter what strategy is used. Not one technology is going to be best for all patients. I foresee a time when we’ll have a boutique of technologies and will select one based on the patient’s needs. Currently, we are attacking this challenge on multiple fronts, including using a modified ink jet technology to “print” a small two-chamber heart.

In attempting to describe the implications of the research you are doing, I wrote: "If this research leads to the ability to grow new kidneys, patients with severe kidney disease will be able to get replacement kidneys without a healthy person having to give one of theirs up. If this research leads to the ability to grow new hearts, patients with severe heart disease will be able to get replacement hearts without someone having to die." Is that an accurate assessment? And, ultimately, will fully compatible replacement organs grown using these kinds of techniques eliminate the need for organ donation, and all of the logistical, ethical, and immunological difficulties associated with that practice?

There are currently almost 99,000 people on the waiting list for an organ transplant and nowhere near enough donors to meet their needs. Our goal is certainly to develop organs and tissues in the laboratory to help solve this shortage. As you know, we have already created bladders in the laboratory that have been successfully implanted in patients. These are grown from a patient’s own cells, so there were no issues with rejection. Similarly, if organs/tissues are grown from stem cells that are a genetic match to a patient, rejection will not be a problem. It is much too soon to predict whether we’ll be successful growing all organs and whether the need for organ donation can eventually be eliminated.

Continue reading "The Man Who Builds Hearts" »

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 07:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

UPDATE: Instalanche! Thanks for the links, Glenn, both here and on the new Better All the Time, which features a roundup of good news related to that most irreplaceable of parts -- the human brain.

This really got my attention:

In his lab at Wake Forest University, a lab he calls a medical factory, Dr. Anthony Atala is growing body parts.

Atala and his team have built, from the cell level up, 18 different types of tissue so far, including muscle tissue, whole organs and the pulsing heart valve of a sheep.

"And is it growing?"...

"Absolutely," Atala said, showing him, "All this white material is new tissue."

"When people ask me 'what do you do,' we grow tissues and organs," he said. "We are making body parts that we can implant right back into patients."

Dr. Atala, one of the pioneers of regeneration, believes every type of tissue already has cells ready to regenerate if only researchers can prod them into action. Sometimes that prodding can look like science fiction.

Emerging from an everyday ink jet printer is the heart of a mouse. Mouse heart cells go into the ink cartridge and are then sprayed down in a heart shaped pattern layer by layer.

Dr. Atala believes it's a matter of time before someone grows a human heart.

How big a deal is this? Consider this analysis, found on Dr. Atala's site at Wake Forest University:

The Joint Commission for Health Care Organizations (JCAHO) recently declared the shortage of transplantable organs and tissues a public health crisis. There is about one death every 30 seconds due to organ failure, and complications and rejection are still significant problems. The national cost of caring for persons who might benefit from engineered tissues or organs has reached $600 billion annually.

If this research leads to the ability to grow new kidneys, patients with severe kidney disease will be able to get replacement kidneys without a healthy person having to give one of theirs up. If this research leads to the ability to grow new hearts, patients with severe heart disease will be able to get replacement hearts without someone having to die.

Call me easily excited, but that strikes me as a distinct improvement.

Plus the patients will benefit from the elimination of all the complications associated with organ rejection. I don't think there will be much of a problem with people's bodies rejecting their own organs.

Additionally, this research seems likely to lead to some breakthroughs in life extension -- at least a stop-gap version of life extension wherein patients can replace parts as they go and keep the overall system functioning. Moreover, there may be some key parts of the body which, if replaced with new versions, can "trick" the body into thinking its younger than it really is. Clearly a new heart or kidney won't have that effect, but what would a brand new pituitary gland do? Also, could regeneration techniques help mitigate damage to the brain cause by Alzheimer's or Parkinson's?

Stay tuned.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 06:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

No, we're not quite there, yet. But it looks like we're much closer than we were:

SCIENTISTS have created a beating heart in the laboratory in a breakthrough that could allow doctors one day to make a range of organs for transplant almost from scratch.

The procedure involved stripping all the existing cells from a dead heart so that only the protein “skeleton” that created its shape was left.

Then the skeleton was seeded with live “progenitor” cells, which multiplied and grew back over it, eventually linking together into a new organ. Such cells are involved in the formative stages of specialised types of tissue such as those found in the heart.

The research, by scientists at the University of Minnesota, has so far been done only with rats and pigs and is highly experimental. It is unlikely to be applied to humans for years.
However, Professor Doris Taylor, director of the university’s centre for cardiovascular repair, believes it could be a significant step towards creating custom-built hearts, blood vessels and other organs for people with serious illness.

The big advantage of such an approach is that organs so built would use stem cells taken from the patient so the body’s immune system would not reject them.

“The idea would be to develop transplantable blood vessels or whole organs that are made from your own cells,” Taylor said. “It opens a door to the notion that you can make any organ - kidney, liver or pancreas. You name it and we hope we can make it.”

The promise of this procedure would be difficult to overstate. To be able to give someone whose body has been devastated by heart or kidney disease a healthy organ with no need for a donor and with no real risk that that the transplanted organ will be rejected...that's huge. I wonder if the same or a similar procedure could be used to re-grow seemingly simpler structures such as bones and teeth? Also, could the same or a similar process be used to replace sections of a damaged spinal cord?

Plus, I have to wonder what the possible life extension implications this development might have. There's the question of the "age" of the new organ. If I'm 45 and I have a new heart grown in this manner and transplanted in, is it a 45 year old heart? Or is it younger? If younger, what would happen if a person swapped in a new pituitary gland grown in this manner? The new glad might start sending signals out to the older body telling it that it's younger than it really is. Of course, this won't repair accumulated cell damage, but this perhaps this could at least slow down the process of a body shutting itself down.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 06:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Next time Stephen packs up his family for one of those all-nighter cross-country excursions, maybe he will benefit from this development:

As the line between science fiction and reality becomes increasingly blurry, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has always led the pack in terms of cool, weird, wacky and frightening innovations. This time Darpa-funded scientists have found a drug that eliminates sleepiness with a nasal spray of a key brain hormone. The spray has worked well in lab experiments, with no apparent side effects. The hope is that the hormone will serve as a promising sleep-replacement drug in humans.

The spray contains a naturally occurring brain hormone called orexin A. In tests, monkeys suffering from sleep deprivation were treated with the substance and were subsequently able to perform like well-rested monkeys on cognitive tests. Darpa is no doubt interested in the spray for it’s promise of keeping soldiers awake and alert during battle, but for those suffering from narcolepsy, the discovery may offers a potential treatment. Even those with less severe sleep disorders may be interested. According to the National Sleep Foundation, than 70 percent of Americans get less than the generally recommended eight hours of sleep per night and consequently suffer some type of sleep-deprivation symptoms.

I, for one, have about a six-cup daily coffee habit that I would like to shake. I would go cold turkey, but I don't think I could take three weeks or so of being (alternately) comatose and psychotic. Maybe this stuff could help?

As there are no side-effects (yet identified), I wonder what possibilities there are for long-term use? You want to talk about kicking the habit -- could those who are so inclined kick the sleep "habit" once and for all? One could potentially add north of 25% productive (or fun) time to one's day. Second career, night school, hobbies -- the possibilities are intriguing.

If this stuff were to become readily available, I can see it being widely used. But given the option, would people give up sleep altogether?

Would you?

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 05:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

On Sunday I told the FastForward Radio audience that I had a cold. I was sure I was going to go into a coughing fit during the show. The show went fine but this cold got worse over the next couple of days. Today's Wednesday and I'm thankful to be feeling better, but the last couple of days have been miserable. It's the sort of thing we all get to go through about once a year. The runny nose, the cough... the works.

My doctor assured me that what I have is almost certainly viral. Antibiotics won't help. "Don't go to work," he said. "Go home, take it easy, drink plenty of fluids and get rest." How old fashioned is that advice? I'll bet my grandparents got the same advice 50 years ago.

So, with time on my hands the last couple of days, I got to daydreaming about what kind of care would be ideal for these minor - or not so minor - colds and flus. When we understand how to combat these illnesses, how would the treatment work?

Sunday Morning, November 20, 2016

I awaken with the realization that the illness I've been fighting has gained the upper hand. My throat is sore and I've got the beginning of a runny nose. No problem. After a light breakfast I call my doctor's office.

Of course the doctor himself is not in on Sunday morning, but it hardly matters. The call is forwarded to the local hospital's 24/7 clinic. The attending doctor writes down my name and symptoms and asks that I come in as soon as possible. "Can you get here this morning?"

"Yes, I'll be right there." I make myself as presentable as possible and drive down to the hospital.

Once I arrive I'm taken quickly to an examination room. Doctors have decided that packed waiting rooms full of sick people is bad practice. If there's not an exam room available, patients are encouraged to sit in their cars and wait for the call to walk in.

In the exam room the nurse asks me my symptoms again. She writes it up on her medical PDA. She then takes a swab culture from the back of my throat. She takes the culture down the hall to a flash sequencer. This DNA machine doesn't require that the culture be grown any larger. The little swab in the bottom of the Petri dish is sufficient. The machine is a powerful AI that knows more medicine than most doctors. But it is not considered self-aware.

The machine dutifully goes to work. It has received the symptom reports from both the attending doctor and the nurse. It already expects what it will find, but it goes through a full screening. First, it detects my own DNA. After a brief search for genetic abnormalities it continues. It detects the DNA of several bacterial species - two of which are beneficial for healthy oral hygiene, one of which is unhealthy and is responsible for tooth decay. The machine makes a note of that, but keeps looking. Then it finds what it's looking for. A viral infection - Strep type 10237a. It goes to the online database to determine how widespread this virus is.

Since the virus is already common in this region, and easily treated, the machine will not recommend quarantine. It reports this new case for the database and backs out of the network. It completes its search by looking for markers for cancer. There are none.

The machine produces a report for the doctor. It recommends prescriptions for two drugs - an anti-viral medication developed specifically for this virus, and a mouthwash to fight the harmful oral bacteria. The mouthwash is not an antiseptic. It is an active culture of beneficial bacteria - reinforcements for the good guys.

A doctor gets this report on his prescription pad PDA. He signs it almost perfunctorily and walks in to see me. He tells me what they found and asks me which pharmacy to send the prescription to. He forwards it electronically. My pharmacy's AI will call as soon as the prescription is ready.

I know that the pharmacy is fast so I don't go back home. Thirty minutes later I'm leaving the pharmacy with my prescriptions. The doctor has encouraged me to begin taking the medicine immediately. I do. The doctor tells me to expect feeling better by the evening. He's right.

By Monday morning I feel 100%.

Posted by Stephen Gordon at 08:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Scientists have been excited about the possibilities of embryonic stem cells at least since they were isolated in 1998. These cells are the root of the tree. We start as a handful of these cells and grow into a full individual. These cells can - and do - differentiate to become all parts of the body. If we could harness this capability, theoretically we could grow entire replacement organs. Or we could treat diseases like diabetes and heart disease noninvasively.

That's been the hope. But in order for embryonic stem cells to help a particular patient, they need to be a match for that patient. Up until now, the only way to get a perfectly matching stem cell line was by cloning. First, a human egg was harvested painfully from a woman. Then the egg donor's genetic material would be removed and the patient's genetic material would be added. After the resulting embryo had divided a few times, stem cells could be harvested - killing the embryo.

If that sounds labor intensive, it is. If it sounds expensive, it is. If it sounds ethically questionable - well, you're not alone in thinking that. Some question the destruction of the embryo; others see the potential of exploiting women for their eggs. For embryonic stem cells to move beyond the lab to produce therapies for patients, we needed a better way to produce embryonic stem cells. It looks like we got it:

Scientists have made ordinary human skin cells take on the chameleon-like powers of embryonic stem cells, a startling breakthrough that might someday deliver the medical payoffs of embryo cloning without the controversy.

Laboratory teams on two continents report success in a pair of landmark papers released Tuesday. It's a neck-and-neck finish to a race that made headlines five months ago, when scientists announced that the feat had been accomplished in mice.

...

"People didn't know it would be this easy," Thomson said. "Thousands of labs in the United States can do this, basically tomorrow."

And we need thousands of labs. We need the stem cell lines for research, and we also need for this method to be perfected. At present the method disrupts the skin-cell DNA too much to be safe. It is thought that as this procedure is refined, the risk of creating cancer instead of stem cells will be reduced.

Glenn Reynolds remarked that if this pans out, it will be the biggest story of the year. I think it will pan out. There's essentially no chance that this could be hoax - as with Dr. Hwang back in 2005. This research was accomplished independently by teams on two continents. And since it can be easily reproduced, this is likely to become accepted science very soon.

But this probably won't be the biggest story of this year. This is the sort of story that only excites those who understand the implication. It's likely to be a bigger story in a few years when medical breakthroughs start disrupting medicine-as-usual. When that happens researchers can point back to this moment as the watershed - the point at which it all began.

Posted by Stephen Gordon at 10:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

An Oxford University team is developing a new cancer fighting technique that is noninvasive, does not use toxic chemicals, or radioactivity. It is called Hifu - High Intensity Focused Ultrasound.

This is the same principle behind burning leaves with a magnifying glass. But here, instead of focusing light, they are focusing ultrasound. When the ultrasound focuses, bubbles are generated within the body. When the bubbles pop, sufficient heat is released to kill surrounding cells - which, hopefully, are cancer cells.

But the existing Hifu technique has two important limitations compared with surgery that are hindering its clinical uptake. First, it is very slow: it takes up to five hours to treat a 10cm tumour, compared with the 45 minutes or so it takes a surgeon to cut the tissue out.

Secondly, clinicians are working in the dark: without invasive surgery, the results can only be assessed after the treatment is over.

Why not use an MRI to see exactly what you're cooking... as you're cooking it? Right now they are monitoring the progress of these treatments only by monitoring the temperature of the tissue and by sound. The have a sensor that actually hears the bubbles pop. Still, that doesn't tell you what tissue the bubble killed.

[Oxford University researcher] Dr Coussios commented: "If we can use cavitation to accelerate the treatment, better localise the treatment - meaning that you will never get pre-focal damage - deliver the treatment at a lower frequency so you can go deeper in the body, and if we can also use these bubbles to monitor the treatment in real time, we have solved all the major limitations of Hifu in one go."

Posted by Stephen Gordon at 05:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Dr. Zheng Cui specializes in tumor biology at Wake Forest University Hospital in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. As an associate professor at the university, he teaches biochemistry, molecular biology, lipid biochemistry, cancer biology, and cancer immunology. Dr. Cui's groundbreaking research in identifying innate immunity to cancer in mice and, more recently, human beings has received significant recent media attention. At the Speculist, we have been following these developments for some time. So we were delighted when Dr. Cui agreed to take the time to chat with us about this exciting research and what it has to say about how cancer will be dealt with in the very near future.

We'll also be talking to Dr. Cui in an upcoming FastForward Radio segment, so keep watching this space.

How did you make the initial connection between cancer and the immune system?

In 1999, my lab encountered a mouse that was expected to die upon a lethal injection of cancer cells that uniformly killed all other normal mice we tested before, several dozens or even several hundreds. But he didn’t. In the following years, we came to realize that the ability of survival from lethal cancer challenges was a genetic trait that can be passed on to 40% of offspring if one parent was cancer-resistant. We also found out that the apparently innate, naturally-existing resistance was entirely mediated by the cellular immune system. One could deplete the cellular immune system and thus abolish the resistance or transfer the immune cells from the resistant donors to normal mice that would subsequently acquire similar resistance to cancer. It also became apparent that this kind of cancer resistance is very different from any previously described cancer immunity in the literature, this newly found innate cancer immunity was much stronger. We basically used the “normal mice” that were used for demonstrating immunity to cancer as our negative controls (non-resistant controls). We knew at very early stages that we were dealing with something very different, a rare display of Mother Nature’s power in a very simple form.

It appears that immunity to cancer in mice is an all-or-nothing affair, but in human beings it falls according to a normal distribution. How do you account for this difference, and does it suggest to you that -- owing to the necessarily limited sample size of human beings that you have examined for cancer immunity to date -- there may be people out there with "super" cancer immunity: not subject to change of seasons, stress, or some of the other limitations you have encountered?

The difference is based upon the fact that lab mice are most inbred and humans are outbred. The lab mice are maintained as pure strains. Within the strains, breeding is routinely done between brothers and sisters of same strain. After many generations of this kind of inbreeding, the genetic make-up of all the mice within the strains are very much homogenized. Thus, the mice within the same strains are considered as identical twins except occasional germline mutations. Most humans, on the other hand, except identical twins, are outbred populations and have distinct genetic make-up from each other.

Dr. Zheng Cui

The anticancer activity in human leukocytes is very dynamic. It suggests that it is indeed interfaced with many environmental factors, such as the changes of seasons, stress and aging. Before we have evidence showing that some humans may indeed have the “super” activity untouched by these factors, we would rather base our treatment strategies on the influence of these factors on most human donors. I do believe that there are humans out there to have such “super” activity but these individuals are rare in my opinion.

Why would cancer immunity be subject to external conditions such as stress or the seasons?

One thing we have collectively learned is that reactions of humans to things like stress is a physiological response called “fight or flight response”. The major mediator of this kind of response is the release of stress hormones such as glucocorticoids, or steroid hormones. These hormones become potent stimulators of SOME physiological functions, like heart beat, skeletal muscles contractions etc. Meanwhile, steroid hormones suppress many other physiological functions that are not immediately crucial for survival responses, or “fight or flight”. This is merely a redistribution of energy metabolism from auxiliary functions to strength-related functions. Short and not-so-frequent stress reaction is not considered harmful to humans and other animals. However, if the stress signals linger, the constitutive release of low level of stress hormones would have a lasting suppressive effects on the immune functions. It is well documented that stress suppresses immunity in many aspects.

Many biologists believe that life forms including humans began at equatorial regions where solar energy is constant year-round. As humans become civilized with tools to travel, they began to move away from the equator and into places with seasonal changes. In the early days of moving north and south from the equator, one way to confront winters when food became severely scarce was to hunker down in the caves and reduce energy-consuming activity. This kind of life pattern may have lasted for over a million years for humans to overcome the food shortage in the winter. Human activity in the winters only began after industrialization, about several hundred years or several thousands years ago at best. It is possible that the changes in our physiological strategies for overcoming winters adapted over a million years has not caught up with the only recent events of industrialization in recent centuries. The extremely cases for animal to overcome winters are the cases of hibernation, such as in the bears and ground squirrels. The metabolic rates could have easily dropped to 5-10% of their summer levels. Humans don’t go to that extreme. But many of us do feel winter lows in everything in comparison to summers. Maybe the immune reaction is just one of these things sensitive to winters when we have to confront flu and other infectious diseases. The flu season may be a good example of weakened immune system due to winters.

The next step in your research is to test a transfusion of cancer-killing granulocytes in human subjects. How will you choose your test subjects? When do you expect the trial to begin?

Our first trial for using granulocytes from cancer-resistant donors to treat cancer patients will begin, hopefully, in June of 2008, when the cancer-killing activity in leukocytes returns and after we are able to raise enough money to support the trial.

We will choose cancer patients who no longer respond to conventional cancer therapies. We prefer the patients who have what we called measurable diseases so that the outcome of the treatment can be easily monitored. Patients have to be ambulatory and have at least 4 months of life expectancy. Sometimes, even the best medicine can’t save the lives of patients if it is too late.

We will select the donors who are healthy and preferably young and have high cancer-killing activities. Of course, they should be free of infectious diseases.

How do you anticipate this research to impact the treatment of other diseases? Is there an immune component to heart disease or diabetes? It would seem that there is a straightforward (potential) application for HIV.

I would be very happy if this new treatment can bring some kind of clinical benefits to cancer patients, such as one or more extra years of good quality life without the side effects of chemo and radiation therapies. Everything more would be just bonuses. After that, I am pretty sure that there will be an army of scientists who would figure out how they can translate this new concept for treating other human conditions.

Continue reading "Closing in on the Cure" »

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 08:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

...coming too fast to discuss at length. So let me just point to:

Stem Cells from Skin Cells

...in mice. Researches believe it can be done with humans too.

The obvious benefit would be to allow researchers to cheaply and ethically develop embryonic stem cell lines matching anyone.

Genetic risk factors for seven diseases identified

The seven being:

• Crohn's disease
  
• Rheumatoid arthritis
  
• Type 1 diabetes
  
• Type 2 diabetes
  
• Bipolar disorder
  
• Coronary heart disease
  
• Hypertension

Scientists studied DNA samples from 17,000 people. This was only possible because DNA sequencing costs keep plummeting.

Miracle Weight Loss Hormone Discovered!

Sounds like a headline from a tabloid, but researchers are very excited.

Researchers have identified a master hormone that allows the body to fuel itself with stored fat during times of fasting. The hormone mobilizes lipids from fat cells, and then directs the liver to transform those lipids into energy-rich molecules that circulate throughout the body.

...

FGF21's unexpectedly broad role in fat-burning was reported in two papers published in the June, 2007, issue of the journal Cell Metabolism.

...

“FGF21 seems to have these almost magical properties,” said [UT Southwestern researcher] Kliewer. “It improves insulin sensitivity, making insulin in the body work more efficiently. It lowers lipid levels, triglyceride levels, and cholesterol levels, and induces weight loss.

Wow: a beneficial five-fer.

Posted by Stephen Gordon at 10:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I've been very busy this week going back and forth between work and the hospital. My mother had a mass removed from her digestive track. We were all very concerned that it might be cancerous. We just got the news today that it wasn't. We are so thankful.

Benign or not, this was a dangerous tumor because it was fast growing. When it was discovered a month ago it was the size of a golf ball. It was closer to a tennis ball by the time it was removed. Fifty years ago people would just get sick and die from an obstruction like this. There was really little that could be done. Up until about five years ago surgery to take care of this problem would have involved a major abdominal incision – with all the risks and complications and difficult recovery that comes with that.

My mother's surgery was done arthroscopically with no external incision at all. We've been told to expect her home by Sunday - Mother's Day.

Posted by Stephen Gordon at 01:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Randall Parker says that it could be as easy as ABC...D:

60% Cancer Drop From Vitamin D Supplements

As regular readers know, I've been after you for years to raise your body vitamin D levels. If you haven't gotten off your duff yet to do anything about it how about this as something to get you going? A study coming out in June will report a more than halving of the incidence of cancer by taking vitamin D supplements.

The linked article goes on to describe the study which has yielded these astounding results in greater detail, noting that a drop of 60% indicates twice the impact on cancer of smoking. However, Randall urges caution about mega-doing on vitamin D:

I would suggest refraining from doses above 2000 IU, at least for now. Vitamin D research has become such a hot topic that we should expect more clarification on the risks and benefits of higher doses. But my guess from what I've read so far is that a 2000 IU dose daily is enough to provide the vast majority of the benefit.

Of course, the other way to get vitamin D is through exposure to the sun, but then that raises the risk of cancer. So we have a lot to learn. Still, this is potentially a huge development. And I don't think it's out of line at this stage to suggest that we should all at least be getting our RDA of vitamin D.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 07:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

...because I like it. I'll just have to take the fact that it may prevent cancer as a bonus.

How interesting that both chiles and curry may have life-extending properties. Indian food rules! (Not to mention Thai and Malay!)

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 11:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We wrote about the amazing cancer-proof mice a couple of months ago. Now there is speculation that these mice might eventually lead us to finding a way to make cancer-proof people. In fact, they may already be among us -- sort of. The same white blood cells that zap cancer in the amazing mouse may be present in some human beings -- accounting for why some people get cancer and others don't. This could also explain why some people manage to get their cancer into remission and recover much better than others.

Plus, Jan-Willem Bats at Our Technological Future directs us to this very encouraging article about the possibility of HIV immunity.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 03:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Very interesting:

Modafinil is just the first of a wave of new lifestyle drugs that promise to do for sleep what the contraceptive pill did for sex - unshackle it from nature. Since time immemorial, humans have structured their lives around sleep. In the near future, we will, for the first time, be able to significantly structure the way we sleep to suit our lifestyles.

"The more we understand about the body's 24-hour clock the more we will be able to override it," says Professor Russell Foster, a circadian biologist at Imperial College London. "In 10 to 20 years we'll be able to pharmacologically turn sleep off. Mimicking sleep will take longer, but I can see it happening." Professor Foster envisages a world in which it's possible, or even routine, for people to be active for 22 hours a day and sleep for two.

I can see this having a lot of appeal. Sleeping only four hours per night could add an entire half workday of productive time to every day of your life. What would we do with the time if we had it?

I also like the idea of being able to turn sleep on when needed. If it were an option, I would always sleep through every flight I have to take.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 02:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

What a concept:

Patients with complete heart block, or disrupted electrical conduction in their hearts, are at risk for life-threatening rhythm disturbances and heart failure. The condition is currently treated by implanting a pacemaker in the patient's chest or abdomen, but these devices often fail over time, particularly in infants and small children who must undergo many re-operations. Researchers at Children's Hospital Boston have now taken preliminary steps toward using a patient's own cells instead of a pacemaker, marking the first time tissue-engineering methods have been used to create electrically conductive tissue for the heart. Results appear in the July issue of the American Journal of Pathology (published online on June 19).

The current thinking is that this tissue won't replace pacemakers -- at least not initially -- rather it will serve as a backup to the little extremely-useful-if-somewhat-failure-prone gizmos.

Hat-tip: Dave Gobel.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 12:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Here's an encouraging development:

Washington, DC — More than twenty years of collaborative research in the Georgetown lab of Dr. Richard Schlegel has resulted in a major medical breakthrough — the world’s first cancer vaccine.

The vaccine's technology was generated by a team of Georgetown University researchers in the early 1990s and licensed for commercial development. On June 8, the Food and Drug Administration approved the vaccine, which scientists say could eliminate most new cases of cervical cancer worldwide. Called Gardasil, the vaccine blocks four strains of HPV, including two that give rise to nearly 75 percent of cervical cancer cases and two other strains that cause about 50 percent of genital warts.

“It’s a researcher’s dream … to see something that started as a very cerebral idea in the laboratory to advance through animal and clinical trials, gain FDA approval and ultimately have a major global impact,” Schlegel said. “It’s highly unlikely but extremely gratifying to see it through so far.”

So that's one down, many to go. A good start!

Hat-tip: Boulder Future Salon

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 04:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I can't imagine why this isn't the biggest news story of the day week year:

White Blood Cells From Cancer-resistant Mice Cure Cancers In Ordinary Mice

White blood cells from a strain of cancer-resistant mice cured advanced cancers in ordinary laboratory mice, researchers at Wake Forest University School of Medicine reported today.

"Even highly aggressive forms of malignancy with extremely large tumors were eradicated," Zheng Cui, M.D., Ph.D., and colleagues reported in this week's on-line edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The transplanted white blood cells not only killed existing cancers, but also protected normal mice from what should have been lethal doses of highly aggressive new cancers.

The only downside here is that the scientists don't yet know quite how this one very special mouse's blood does what it does. That will be key in figuring out how (or whether) this breakthrough can be applied a little closer to home.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 08:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)