Friday, December 30, 2011
new approach for emphysema treatment
Uptake Medical, which is developing new medical device technologies to treat emphysema, has raised $35 million of a $41 million venture capital round, according to a SEC filing.
Here’s a closer look at how Uptake’s InterVapor technology works, which utilizes heated water vapor to reduce diseased tissue in emphysema patients.
Friday, December 23, 2011
Scientists find possible lung stem cell
Scientists find possible lung stem cell
click to read more info on lung stem cells for emphysema
Scientists find possible lung stem cell, could lead to new therapies for emphysema, other ills
NEW YORK, N.Y. - Scientists believe they've discovered stem cells in the lung that can make a wide variety of the organ's tissues, a finding that might open new doors for treating emphysema and other diseases.
When these human cells were injected into mice, they showed their versatility by rebuilding airways, air sacs and blood vessels within two weeks. One expert called that "amazing."
While stem cells have been found in bone marrow and some other parts of the body, it hasn't been clear whether such a versatile cell existed in the lung.
Experts not involved in the study stressed that the work must be confirmed by further research and that it's too soon to make any promises about therapies. But they said it could be a significant advance in a difficult field of research.
"These are remarkable findings and they have extraordinary implications," said Dr. Alan Fine of Boston University, who called the mouse results amazing. "But it has to be replicated."
Stem cells can produce a wide variety of specialized kinds of cells. Scientists are working to harness them as repair kits for fixing damage from diseases like Parkinson's and diabetes. Most people have heard about embryonic stem cells, which have caused controversy because embryos must be destroyed to recover them.
In contrast, the new lung cell would be an "adult" stem cell, like others found in the body. Adult stem cells maintain and repair the tissues where they're found. The bone marrow cells, for example, give rise to various kinds of blood cells, and they've been used for years in transplants to treat leukemia and other blood diseases.
The lung work is reported in Thursday's issue of the New England Journal of Medicine by Drs. Piero Anversa and Joseph Loscalzo and colleagues at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. In a telephone interview, Anversa said it's not clear what the lung stem cell normally does but that he thinks it's involved in replacing other lung cells lost throughout life.
Loscalzo said it's too early to tell what lung diseases might be treated someday by using the cells. He said researchers are initially looking at emphysema and high blood pressure in the arteries of the lungs, called pulmonary hypertension. Emphysema is a progressive disease that destroys key parts of the lung, leaving large cavities that interfere with the lung's function.
Anversa said the cells may also prove useful to build up lungs after lung cancer surgery. It's not clear whether they could be used in treating asthma, he said.
While a lung stem cell theoretically could be used to grow a lung in a lab for transplant, Loscalzo said that would be very difficult because the lung is so complex. Instead, he said, scientists will first look at isolating the cells from a patient, multiplying them in the laboratory, and then injecting them back into the patient's lung.
The mouse experiments showed "the cells are smarter than we are," able to build normal lung structures in an injured lung, he said.
The researchers found the cells in donated surgical samples of adult tissue. The same cells appeared in tissue donated from nine fetuses that had died, giving evidence that the cells are present before birth and perhaps participate in lung development. To study the cells' behaviour, researchers injured lungs of mice and then injected six doses of about 20,000 cells apiece.
Within 10 to 14 days, the injected cells had formed airways, blood vessels and air sacs. "We had a very large amount of regeneration" involving millions of new cells, Anversa said.
The new tissue showed "seamless" connection to the rest of the lung, and researchers believe it would work, although that wasn't tested, Loscalzo said. The results appeared in all 29 mice tested.
Dr. Brigitte Gomperts at the Broad Stem Cell Research Center at the University of California, Los Angeles, said scientists have been hotly debating whether a single stem cell type could give rise to the more than 40 cell types in the lung __ cells that do such different jobs as protecting the body from inhaled germs and exchanging oxygen for carbon dioxide. It's a technically difficult question to study, said Gomperts, who was not involved in the new work.
If the new results can be confirmed, "it's a significant advance" that will help in understanding normal lung repair and abnormal repair found in disease, she said.
The work was supported by the National Institutes of Health and a Swiss foundation.
When these human cells were injected into mice, they showed their versatility by rebuilding airways, air sacs and blood vessels within two weeks. One expert called that "amazing."
While stem cells have been found in bone marrow and some other parts of the body, it hasn't been clear whether such a versatile cell existed in the lung.
Experts not involved in the study stressed that the work must be confirmed by further research and that it's too soon to make any promises about therapies. But they said it could be a significant advance in a difficult field of research.
"These are remarkable findings and they have extraordinary implications," said Dr. Alan Fine of Boston University, who called the mouse results amazing. "But it has to be replicated."
Stem cells can produce a wide variety of specialized kinds of cells. Scientists are working to harness them as repair kits for fixing damage from diseases like Parkinson's and diabetes. Most people have heard about embryonic stem cells, which have caused controversy because embryos must be destroyed to recover them.
In contrast, the new lung cell would be an "adult" stem cell, like others found in the body. Adult stem cells maintain and repair the tissues where they're found. The bone marrow cells, for example, give rise to various kinds of blood cells, and they've been used for years in transplants to treat leukemia and other blood diseases.
The lung work is reported in Thursday's issue of the New England Journal of Medicine by Drs. Piero Anversa and Joseph Loscalzo and colleagues at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. In a telephone interview, Anversa said it's not clear what the lung stem cell normally does but that he thinks it's involved in replacing other lung cells lost throughout life.
Loscalzo said it's too early to tell what lung diseases might be treated someday by using the cells. He said researchers are initially looking at emphysema and high blood pressure in the arteries of the lungs, called pulmonary hypertension. Emphysema is a progressive disease that destroys key parts of the lung, leaving large cavities that interfere with the lung's function.
Anversa said the cells may also prove useful to build up lungs after lung cancer surgery. It's not clear whether they could be used in treating asthma, he said.
While a lung stem cell theoretically could be used to grow a lung in a lab for transplant, Loscalzo said that would be very difficult because the lung is so complex. Instead, he said, scientists will first look at isolating the cells from a patient, multiplying them in the laboratory, and then injecting them back into the patient's lung.
The mouse experiments showed "the cells are smarter than we are," able to build normal lung structures in an injured lung, he said.
The researchers found the cells in donated surgical samples of adult tissue. The same cells appeared in tissue donated from nine fetuses that had died, giving evidence that the cells are present before birth and perhaps participate in lung development. To study the cells' behaviour, researchers injured lungs of mice and then injected six doses of about 20,000 cells apiece.
Within 10 to 14 days, the injected cells had formed airways, blood vessels and air sacs. "We had a very large amount of regeneration" involving millions of new cells, Anversa said.
The new tissue showed "seamless" connection to the rest of the lung, and researchers believe it would work, although that wasn't tested, Loscalzo said. The results appeared in all 29 mice tested.
Dr. Brigitte Gomperts at the Broad Stem Cell Research Center at the University of California, Los Angeles, said scientists have been hotly debating whether a single stem cell type could give rise to the more than 40 cell types in the lung __ cells that do such different jobs as protecting the body from inhaled germs and exchanging oxygen for carbon dioxide. It's a technically difficult question to study, said Gomperts, who was not involved in the new work.
If the new results can be confirmed, "it's a significant advance" that will help in understanding normal lung repair and abnormal repair found in disease, she said.
The work was supported by the National Institutes of Health and a Swiss foundation.
click to read more info on lung stem cells for emphysema
new procedure InterVapor used to treat severe emphysema
Surgical and endoscopic options can be considered in patients with severe emphysema once they have been treated with many of the above treatment options, but still remain disabled due to the disease. These options include:
read more on this new procedure for emphysema
- Surgical Options: Lung volume reduction surgery removes a portion of the diseased lung tissue and has been shown to improve lung function, symptoms and exercise capacity. Lung transplantation is an option for only a very select groups of patients. Even though both are effective, they are associated with significant risks and complications for the few patients who qualify for them, and are rarely used.
- Endoscopic Lung Volume Reduction (ELVR): A relatively new group of non-surgical treatments use a bronchoscope – a small flexible tube with a light and camera lens – to permanently treat and reduce hyperinflation. These include placing one-way valves, wire-like coils or chemical foam sealant into the lungs. All of these ELVR treatments are designed to provide a permanent approach to treating hyperinflation. InterVapor™ is also in this group. But unlike these other treatments, InterVapor uses only heated water vapor and the body’s healing process to effectively reduce the size and volume of the lung.
read more on this new procedure for emphysema
Monday, December 19, 2011
what's this new Lung perfusion ?
what's this new Lung perfusion ?
New hope for lung transplant patients, Lung perfusion
New machine and procedures to restore donor lungs for possible use as transplants.
This is not performed on your lungs. It is performed on future donor lungs.
Here a short story concerning a older patient who was in Susan Dunnett's end stage emphysema made it nearly impossible for her to do anything. It would take the 65-year-old up to 40 minutes to get up the steps and it as long as 20 minutes to get out of bed.
“I just didn't have the breath for it,” she says.
A doctor, Aldo Iacono, says she probably had about a year to six months to live.
Dr. Iacono knew the 40-year-smoker only had one hope for survival.
“There is no medical therapy for treatment for emphysema when end stage-only treatment is a lung transplant,” the doctor says.
In August, Dunnett became the first person in the country to receive a lung transplant through a new experimental treatment called lung perfusion at the University of Maryland Medical Center.
With this, the donor's lungs are placed on a machine that is able to reverse damage done at death that previously made many lungs unsuitable for transplant.
“We are able to circulate through the lungs a proprietary solution that helps the lungs restore themselves,” says Dr. Bartley Griffith. “And we can look at the lung on the rig and say it's getting better.”
Doctors say if this process saves four out of 10 lungs, it would nearly double the number of lungs available for the thousands of people waiting for a transplant.
“Unfortunately some of our patients never get a chance to have a transplant, the more we can do as physicians and scientists to improve those odds the better,” Griffith says.
It took Dunnett a couple months to recover from surgery. But now she feels great and doctors say her lungs are fully functional.
“I feel like I never smoked a cigarette- never had trouble breathing I feel normal,” Dunnett says. “It's given me my life back.
click for more info on the lung therapy
New hope for lung transplant patients, Lung perfusion
New machine and procedures to restore donor lungs for possible use as transplants.
This is not performed on your lungs. It is performed on future donor lungs.
Here a short story concerning a older patient who was in Susan Dunnett's end stage emphysema made it nearly impossible for her to do anything. It would take the 65-year-old up to 40 minutes to get up the steps and it as long as 20 minutes to get out of bed.
“I just didn't have the breath for it,” she says.
A doctor, Aldo Iacono, says she probably had about a year to six months to live.
Dr. Iacono knew the 40-year-smoker only had one hope for survival.
“There is no medical therapy for treatment for emphysema when end stage-only treatment is a lung transplant,” the doctor says.
In August, Dunnett became the first person in the country to receive a lung transplant through a new experimental treatment called lung perfusion at the University of Maryland Medical Center.
With this, the donor's lungs are placed on a machine that is able to reverse damage done at death that previously made many lungs unsuitable for transplant.
“We are able to circulate through the lungs a proprietary solution that helps the lungs restore themselves,” says Dr. Bartley Griffith. “And we can look at the lung on the rig and say it's getting better.”
Doctors say if this process saves four out of 10 lungs, it would nearly double the number of lungs available for the thousands of people waiting for a transplant.
“Unfortunately some of our patients never get a chance to have a transplant, the more we can do as physicians and scientists to improve those odds the better,” Griffith says.
It took Dunnett a couple months to recover from surgery. But now she feels great and doctors say her lungs are fully functional.
“I feel like I never smoked a cigarette- never had trouble breathing I feel normal,” Dunnett says. “It's given me my life back.
click for more info on the lung therapy
Friday, December 16, 2011
Spare Parts for Humans: Tissue Engineers Aim for Lab-Grown Limbs, Lungs ?
Spare Parts for Humans: Tissue Engineers Aim for Lab-Grown Limbs, Lungs ?
JEFFREY BROWN: Next, research breakthroughs that seem almost like science fiction. It's all about growing human tissue and replacing or repairing muscles and, someday, even limbs.
NewsHour science correspondent Miles O'Brien has our story.
CPL. ISAIAS HERNANDEZ, U.S. Marine Corps: It looked like a chicken, like if you would take a bite out of it down to the bone.
MILES O'BRIEN: It happened in Iraq in 2004. He was badly injured in an artillery attack on his convoy.
CPL. ISAIAS HERNANDEZ: They patched it up because they said the other thank option would be amputation because they couldn't just leave my leg on with a hole in it.
DR. STEPHEN BADYLAK, McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine: You need people who think quantitatively and qualitatively working together on problems like this.
MILES O'BRIEN: What he did was reach out to this man. Dr. Steve Badylak is deputy director of the McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh, where they are in the vanguard of a fast-moving field called tissue engineering. The goal? Grow tissue or even whole organs to repair damaged or diseased human bodies.
Here, they are using pig bladders to help grow human muscle -- that's right, pig bladders. It turns out, they are a good source of a fundamental biological building block known as the extracellular matrix.
DR. STEPHEN BADYLAK: So, the matrix, the extracellular matrix -- we call it ECM -- is a sort of unique collection of structural and functional molecules that we then use as a therapeutic device to tell the body how to heal itself.
MILES O'BRIEN: ECM is like a magnet and a manual for the stem cells inside us. Scientists are not sure why, but the matrix lures those malleable cells and gives them the cues they need to, in this case, morph into muscle.
MILES O'BRIEN: The pillow.
DR. STEPHEN BADYLAK: We call this a powder pillow.
MILES O'BRIEN: The stem cells made their way to a pillow filled with powdered pig bladder matrix implanted in Corporal Hernandez's thigh in 2008. With the help of a lot of hard physical therapy from a very motivated Marine, they became muscle, a lot of muscle.
DR. STEPHEN BADYLAK: We never imagined we were going to get the robust response that we got. Now, he's replaced somewhere between 10 and 15 percent of his muscle mass at that site, but that muscle has gotten so strong that it's something like 50 percent of the strength of the quad.
MILES O'BRIEN: Badylak is starting a larger human trial.
So, using ECM, are you manufacturing body parts?
DR. STEPHEN BADYLAK: We're allowing the body to manufacture. We're setting the stage.
MILES O'BRIEN: Laura Niklason is doing just that in her lab at Yale University. So we can buy parts?
LAURA NIKLASON, Yale University: We have reached the point where we can buy parts. For simple tissues, we can buy parts.
MILES O'BRIEN: Niklason hopes the spare arteries and veins she has grown will be tested in human trials soon, but she is not stopping there. She and her team are growing living, breathing replacement rat lungs that are genetically tailored for a rejection-free transplant, because they are grown from the very cells of the recipient.
LAURA NIKLASON: Otherwise, you would be making a lung that would reject, just like the way lung transplants can reject now. So that's one of the major challenges with engineering a human lung, is we're going to have to learn enough and employ enough stem cell biology so that we can take stem cells from the patient and coax them to become all of the different cell types that we need to make a lung.
MILES O'BRIEN: The key to the coaxing process is our friend the extracellular matrix.
A matrix from a donor rat lung is bathed in cells that are genetically identical to the recipient. The cells marinate in an incubator called a bioreactor for seven days, creating a lung that is a perfect genetic match for the recipient.
If they're not breathing, they don't develop, essentially?
LAURA NIKLASON: Yeah.
MILES O'BRIEN: Unfortunately, the rat lungs she has grown and transplanted so far are short-lived. They fail within hours because of blood clots. Niklason isn't sure why. In fact, there is still a lot she is not sure of.
LAURA NIKLASON: That matrix has an enormous number of cues which we don't yet understand. But it directs the adhesion and the survival of cells within the lung. So, even though we deliver a mixture of cells into the lung, we find that they all go to their proper locations.
MILES O'BRIEN: It will be a long time before scientists will grow a breathing lung or a beating heart that could save a human life, but maybe not as long as you think.
DR. ANTHONY ATALA, Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine: When we started this, this was really still considered science fiction.
MILES O'BRIEN: Anthony Atala is director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine. He's been at it for more than two decades. Now, he and his team are working on engineering more than 30 different tissues and organs, bladders and urethras, ears, skin, muscles, human liver tissue, and even a beating heart valve.
DR. ANTHONY ATALA: We know that, naturally, what a heart does is, it beats on its own. So, for us, the concept of recreating this in the laboratory is really nothing more than just recreating what nature already knows how to do.
MILES O'BRIEN: Atala makes it sound easy, but, of course, it is not. Humans do have the ability to regenerate. Our skin, for example, turns over every two weeks or so. But, over time, humans have also evolved to seal up disease and injuries with scars. It's good for keeping us alive after a trauma, but it prevents regeneration.
DR. DAVID GARDINER, University of California, Irvine: Just because we don't regenerate doesn't mean that we can't regenerate. It just means that we don't.
Now, what we have done here is change the information in the cells at the wound-site.
MILES O'BRIEN: Dr. David Gardiner of the University of California, Irvine, is trying to learn how to make humans better regenerators by studying nature's reigning regeneration champ: the salamander.
DR. DAVID GARDINER: When you cut off a salamander's arm, you can cut it off at any level. So, you can cut off fingers, you can cut off at the wrist or the arm or the elbow or the shoulder. And whatever you cut off, that's always what grows back. It doesn't grow back more and it doesn't grow back less.
MILES O'BRIEN: Gardiner wonders how a human who has lost a limb might be able to recover like a salamander.
DR. DAVID GARDINER: We do in fact have intrinsic regenerative abilities, just like the salamander does. It's just like two ends of the spectrum. We're not very good at regenerating complex organ structures like limbs or spinal cords and stuff like that.
MILES O'BRIEN: But there is some promising research on that front as well. Look at this before-and-after video. It's the same paralyzed rat. Its ability to walk greatly improved after cells like these were implanted near its spinal cord injury.
Aileen Anderson is an associate professor at the University of California, Irvine.
AILEEN ANDERSON, University of California, Irvine: What we know is that when we transplant these cells, we can restore the ability of animals with spinal cord injury to step. We can restore their ability to be coordinated.
MILES O'BRIEN: They are called neural stem cells, stem cells that are ideally suited to repair the central nervous system.
So, neural stem cells are more specialized?
AILEEN ANDERSON: Neural stem cells are more specialized. If you picture sort of a tree with embryonic stem cells at the trunk, and all the specialized cells that are relative to different organs like the brain or the spleen or your bone marrow, up in the branches, they become more and more specialized as you ascend.
MILES O'BRIEN: Anderson and her team are working toward clinical trials to inject neural stem cells into humans with spinal cord injuries.
Could these stem cells act like jumper cables? Maybe so.
AILEEN ANDERSON: Our hypothesis, our working plan here is that that restoration of circuitry is what's yielding the recovery of function.
MILES O'BRIEN: But you don't know for sure?
AILEEN ANDERSON: Nobody knows. How -- how many things do you know in science that you know for sure? We think we -- we think we know this because, if we transplant cells and let animals recover to a stable baseline, and then we selectively ablate the human cells that we transplanted, we lose the functional recovery.
MILES O'BRIEN: Francesco Clark is a big believer in the seemingly magical power of stem cells. In 2002, he dove into the shallow end of a pool.
FRANCESCO CLARK: And I was completely paralyzed in the blink of an eye.
MILES O'BRIEN: At first, he could not move a muscle or even breathe on his own. Over time, he has steadily improved, thanks to a tough regimen of physical therapy and, he says, three stem cell treatments he received in China and Germany. They are not yet approved in the U.S.
So, at this point, do you firmly believe there will be a cure for paralysis and that will derive out of stem cells treatments?
FRANCESCO CLARK: Absolutely. Yes, they're no doubt in my mind. I mean, I'm talking, I'm breathing, I'm moving my arms, I'm wiggling around, I'm getting stronger. It's just -- you want to say it's a matter of time, but it's not just time. There's a lot of effort that goes into it.
MILES O'BRIEN: So, how many years before we come back and see you walking around the house here?
FRANCESCO CLARK: I'm pushing for five years.
MILES O'BRIEN: For real?
FRANCESCO CLARK: Yeah.
MILES O'BRIEN: Like any Marine worth his salt, Isaias Hernandez is still pushing as well.
DR. STEPHEN BADYLAK: He's been such a warrior in more ways than one, that he deserves whatever we can give him. So, we're going to do one more surgery on Cpl. Hernandez. We're going to add more matrix and see if we can build more muscle for him and make him even better than he is today. So that's his future.
MILES O'BRIEN: How you feeling?
CPL. ISAIAS HERNANDEZ: Good.
MILES O'BRIEN: His goal for the future? A return to combat.
Why do you want to go back?
CPL. ISAIAS HERNANDEZ: Want to finish up at least a full tour -- if not, then just do everything to the best of my ability.
MILES O'BRIEN: We done yet?
CPL. ISAIAS HERNANDEZ: Depends on how long you want to ride for. Because these trails total, it's about 10 miles.
MILES O'BRIEN: How is the leg?
CPL. ISAIAS HERNANDEZ: Leg's good.
MILES O'BRIEN: Let's do it.
I am living, exhausted proof he already has plenty of ability, thanks in large part to an exploding field of science that may one day make us all live longer and stronger.
click for a brief video on tissues
JEFFREY BROWN: Next, research breakthroughs that seem almost like science fiction. It's all about growing human tissue and replacing or repairing muscles and, someday, even limbs.
NewsHour science correspondent Miles O'Brien has our story.
CPL. ISAIAS HERNANDEZ, U.S. Marine Corps: It looked like a chicken, like if you would take a bite out of it down to the bone.
MILES O'BRIEN: It happened in Iraq in 2004. He was badly injured in an artillery attack on his convoy.
CPL. ISAIAS HERNANDEZ: They patched it up because they said the other thank option would be amputation because they couldn't just leave my leg on with a hole in it.
DR. STEPHEN BADYLAK, McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine: You need people who think quantitatively and qualitatively working together on problems like this.
MILES O'BRIEN: What he did was reach out to this man. Dr. Steve Badylak is deputy director of the McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh, where they are in the vanguard of a fast-moving field called tissue engineering. The goal? Grow tissue or even whole organs to repair damaged or diseased human bodies.
Here, they are using pig bladders to help grow human muscle -- that's right, pig bladders. It turns out, they are a good source of a fundamental biological building block known as the extracellular matrix.
DR. STEPHEN BADYLAK: So, the matrix, the extracellular matrix -- we call it ECM -- is a sort of unique collection of structural and functional molecules that we then use as a therapeutic device to tell the body how to heal itself.
MILES O'BRIEN: ECM is like a magnet and a manual for the stem cells inside us. Scientists are not sure why, but the matrix lures those malleable cells and gives them the cues they need to, in this case, morph into muscle.
MILES O'BRIEN: The pillow.
DR. STEPHEN BADYLAK: We call this a powder pillow.
MILES O'BRIEN: The stem cells made their way to a pillow filled with powdered pig bladder matrix implanted in Corporal Hernandez's thigh in 2008. With the help of a lot of hard physical therapy from a very motivated Marine, they became muscle, a lot of muscle.
DR. STEPHEN BADYLAK: We never imagined we were going to get the robust response that we got. Now, he's replaced somewhere between 10 and 15 percent of his muscle mass at that site, but that muscle has gotten so strong that it's something like 50 percent of the strength of the quad.
MILES O'BRIEN: Badylak is starting a larger human trial.
So, using ECM, are you manufacturing body parts?
DR. STEPHEN BADYLAK: We're allowing the body to manufacture. We're setting the stage.
MILES O'BRIEN: Laura Niklason is doing just that in her lab at Yale University. So we can buy parts?
LAURA NIKLASON, Yale University: We have reached the point where we can buy parts. For simple tissues, we can buy parts.
MILES O'BRIEN: Niklason hopes the spare arteries and veins she has grown will be tested in human trials soon, but she is not stopping there. She and her team are growing living, breathing replacement rat lungs that are genetically tailored for a rejection-free transplant, because they are grown from the very cells of the recipient.
LAURA NIKLASON: Otherwise, you would be making a lung that would reject, just like the way lung transplants can reject now. So that's one of the major challenges with engineering a human lung, is we're going to have to learn enough and employ enough stem cell biology so that we can take stem cells from the patient and coax them to become all of the different cell types that we need to make a lung.
MILES O'BRIEN: The key to the coaxing process is our friend the extracellular matrix.
A matrix from a donor rat lung is bathed in cells that are genetically identical to the recipient. The cells marinate in an incubator called a bioreactor for seven days, creating a lung that is a perfect genetic match for the recipient.
If they're not breathing, they don't develop, essentially?
LAURA NIKLASON: Yeah.
MILES O'BRIEN: Unfortunately, the rat lungs she has grown and transplanted so far are short-lived. They fail within hours because of blood clots. Niklason isn't sure why. In fact, there is still a lot she is not sure of.
LAURA NIKLASON: That matrix has an enormous number of cues which we don't yet understand. But it directs the adhesion and the survival of cells within the lung. So, even though we deliver a mixture of cells into the lung, we find that they all go to their proper locations.
MILES O'BRIEN: It will be a long time before scientists will grow a breathing lung or a beating heart that could save a human life, but maybe not as long as you think.
DR. ANTHONY ATALA, Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine: When we started this, this was really still considered science fiction.
MILES O'BRIEN: Anthony Atala is director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine. He's been at it for more than two decades. Now, he and his team are working on engineering more than 30 different tissues and organs, bladders and urethras, ears, skin, muscles, human liver tissue, and even a beating heart valve.
DR. ANTHONY ATALA: We know that, naturally, what a heart does is, it beats on its own. So, for us, the concept of recreating this in the laboratory is really nothing more than just recreating what nature already knows how to do.
MILES O'BRIEN: Atala makes it sound easy, but, of course, it is not. Humans do have the ability to regenerate. Our skin, for example, turns over every two weeks or so. But, over time, humans have also evolved to seal up disease and injuries with scars. It's good for keeping us alive after a trauma, but it prevents regeneration.
DR. DAVID GARDINER, University of California, Irvine: Just because we don't regenerate doesn't mean that we can't regenerate. It just means that we don't.
Now, what we have done here is change the information in the cells at the wound-site.
MILES O'BRIEN: Dr. David Gardiner of the University of California, Irvine, is trying to learn how to make humans better regenerators by studying nature's reigning regeneration champ: the salamander.
DR. DAVID GARDINER: When you cut off a salamander's arm, you can cut it off at any level. So, you can cut off fingers, you can cut off at the wrist or the arm or the elbow or the shoulder. And whatever you cut off, that's always what grows back. It doesn't grow back more and it doesn't grow back less.
MILES O'BRIEN: Gardiner wonders how a human who has lost a limb might be able to recover like a salamander.
DR. DAVID GARDINER: We do in fact have intrinsic regenerative abilities, just like the salamander does. It's just like two ends of the spectrum. We're not very good at regenerating complex organ structures like limbs or spinal cords and stuff like that.
MILES O'BRIEN: But there is some promising research on that front as well. Look at this before-and-after video. It's the same paralyzed rat. Its ability to walk greatly improved after cells like these were implanted near its spinal cord injury.
Aileen Anderson is an associate professor at the University of California, Irvine.
AILEEN ANDERSON, University of California, Irvine: What we know is that when we transplant these cells, we can restore the ability of animals with spinal cord injury to step. We can restore their ability to be coordinated.
MILES O'BRIEN: They are called neural stem cells, stem cells that are ideally suited to repair the central nervous system.
So, neural stem cells are more specialized?
AILEEN ANDERSON: Neural stem cells are more specialized. If you picture sort of a tree with embryonic stem cells at the trunk, and all the specialized cells that are relative to different organs like the brain or the spleen or your bone marrow, up in the branches, they become more and more specialized as you ascend.
MILES O'BRIEN: Anderson and her team are working toward clinical trials to inject neural stem cells into humans with spinal cord injuries.
Could these stem cells act like jumper cables? Maybe so.
AILEEN ANDERSON: Our hypothesis, our working plan here is that that restoration of circuitry is what's yielding the recovery of function.
MILES O'BRIEN: But you don't know for sure?
AILEEN ANDERSON: Nobody knows. How -- how many things do you know in science that you know for sure? We think we -- we think we know this because, if we transplant cells and let animals recover to a stable baseline, and then we selectively ablate the human cells that we transplanted, we lose the functional recovery.
MILES O'BRIEN: Francesco Clark is a big believer in the seemingly magical power of stem cells. In 2002, he dove into the shallow end of a pool.
FRANCESCO CLARK: And I was completely paralyzed in the blink of an eye.
MILES O'BRIEN: At first, he could not move a muscle or even breathe on his own. Over time, he has steadily improved, thanks to a tough regimen of physical therapy and, he says, three stem cell treatments he received in China and Germany. They are not yet approved in the U.S.
So, at this point, do you firmly believe there will be a cure for paralysis and that will derive out of stem cells treatments?
FRANCESCO CLARK: Absolutely. Yes, they're no doubt in my mind. I mean, I'm talking, I'm breathing, I'm moving my arms, I'm wiggling around, I'm getting stronger. It's just -- you want to say it's a matter of time, but it's not just time. There's a lot of effort that goes into it.
MILES O'BRIEN: So, how many years before we come back and see you walking around the house here?
FRANCESCO CLARK: I'm pushing for five years.
MILES O'BRIEN: For real?
FRANCESCO CLARK: Yeah.
MILES O'BRIEN: Like any Marine worth his salt, Isaias Hernandez is still pushing as well.
DR. STEPHEN BADYLAK: He's been such a warrior in more ways than one, that he deserves whatever we can give him. So, we're going to do one more surgery on Cpl. Hernandez. We're going to add more matrix and see if we can build more muscle for him and make him even better than he is today. So that's his future.
MILES O'BRIEN: How you feeling?
CPL. ISAIAS HERNANDEZ: Good.
MILES O'BRIEN: His goal for the future? A return to combat.
Why do you want to go back?
CPL. ISAIAS HERNANDEZ: Want to finish up at least a full tour -- if not, then just do everything to the best of my ability.
MILES O'BRIEN: We done yet?
CPL. ISAIAS HERNANDEZ: Depends on how long you want to ride for. Because these trails total, it's about 10 miles.
MILES O'BRIEN: How is the leg?
CPL. ISAIAS HERNANDEZ: Leg's good.
MILES O'BRIEN: Let's do it.
I am living, exhausted proof he already has plenty of ability, thanks in large part to an exploding field of science that may one day make us all live longer and stronger.
click for a brief video on tissues
Friday, December 2, 2011
ALung planning European launch of artificial lung system
ALung planning European launch of artificial lung system
ALung Technologies is targeting a $10 million series B round of investment for the European launch of its respiratory assistance system that removes carbon dioxide from a patient’s blood while directly infusing the blood with oxygen.
The company is already most of the way there, having just closed on $6.6 million and having received commitments for $9 million, CEO Peter DeComo said.
Pittsburgh-based ALung recently completed a German pilot clinical trial of around 20 patients. The company has filed for the CE Mark, which would give it the right to begin European commercialization, and expects to launch its HemoLung product in the first or second quarter. ALung is planning a “slow, controlled launch,” DeComo said.
The series B round has been funded thus far primarily by existing investors, including Birchmere Ventures, a Pittsburgh-based early stage venture capital firm. “The series B is indicative of the current investors’ confidence in the company and its progress,” DeComo said.
The HemoLung delivers oxygen directly into the blood using a catheter into the femoral or jugular vein, similar to kidney dialysis. The technology is intended for patients with acute respiratory failure and could allow such patients to avoid having to breathe through a tube or ventilator.
In October 2010, ALung closed a $14 million series A round, led by Pittsburgh’s Eagle Ventures.
click to read the orginal news release on this artificial lung system
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