THE LIFE AFTER LIFE CONSPIRACY

"Stem cells help regrow damaged heart tissue" --- USA Today

Actually, the same research published in the British medical journal The Lancet, appeared in both USA Today and the British newspaper,  The Independent by John Von Radowitz.

Here's the link to the   USA Today article by Liz Szabo.

Both articles report on the same findings, though with different details.

 

"Cloning scientists create human brain cells," reports the London Observer

 "We can take a skin sample, make stem cells from it and then direct these stem cells to grow into brain cells. Essentially, we are turning a person's skin cells into brain. We are making cells that were previously inaccessible. And we could do that in future for the liver, the heart and other organs on which it is very difficult to carry out biopsies."

--- This from Professor Charles ffrench-Constant, director of the Roslin Institue at Edinburgh University, where sheep Dolly was cloned 16 years ago.

This work does not rely on using embryos at all; instead the cloning or regeneration comes from scraps of a patient's own skin.

Sounds like something from a Michael Crichton thriller? I hope so, but it's not from Crichton's, but rather from one of mine.

I won't spoil the plot of my speculative thriller, THE LIFE AFTER LIFE CONSPIRACY, by pointing out how this work ties in with what is done in the fictional clinic in the book. But it does, and that part of the book was written way back even before Dolly saw the light of day.

The article is by Robin McKie in the Observer of January 28, 2012. Here's the link

 

 

 

 

 

Human embryonic stem cells successfully implanted in chimps

First readers of my speculatIve medical thriller, THE LIFE AFTER LIFE CONSPIRACY, questioned the real-world likelihood of implanting the brain cells from a human fetus into Chimp Donnie.  "Too far out!" they said. "Probably too far out even for a Michael Crichton thriller.")

Well, now the future far-out is happening, and happening in the real-world, not just in my thriller. I could cite several reports on how human brain cells have been implanted in the brains of both humans (and animals, earlier, to test the procedures).  The aim is to treat conditions including stroke, Parkinson's, tumors, Traumatic Brain Injury, and ALS (Lou Gehrig's Disease).

Here's one news report to get you started: London Guardian: Stem cells transformed into brain cells to treat Parkinson's disease

PLOT ADVISORY re: THE LIFE AFTER LIFE CONSPIRACY:  The experimental implantation of brain tissue as done by Dr. Daulby (with the assistance of Chimp Donnie) is not performed for any of the treatment purposes mentioned above.

"Scientist Converts Human Skin Cells Into Functional Brain Cells" -- report in ScienceDaily.com

Scientist Converts Human Skin Cells Into Functional Brain Cells

"ScienceDaily (July 28, 2011) — A scientist at the Gladstone Institutes has discovered a novel way to convert human skin cells into brain cells, advancing medicine and human health by offering new hope for regenerative medicine and personalized drug discovery and development."

I had put this article in my "to post" back in the summer, then overlooked it. Find it here:

 Article: Scientist Converts Human Skin Cells Into Functional Brain Cells

"Synthetic windpipe is used to replace cancerous one"-- NYTimes

Tissue engineering and regrowing human body parts plays a key role in my speculative medical thriller, THE LIFE AFTER LIFE CONSPIRACY, so I'm constantly on the lookout for new breakthroughs in related areas.

I've recently cited a couple of these successes: 

Synthetic windpipes and kidneys "printed" in 3-D

And,

"Lab-grown glands, eyes and brain parts"-- Mo Costandi's report on new Japanese research

Here's  a new instance, this from the New York Times this week, reporting on another successful tissue-engineered windpipe. Particularly interesting are the details of how that was done.

Previously, most implanted tracheas were based on "used" organs taken from cadavers. Those didn't always fit the recipient.

In this case, the medical team (in Sweden) worked from CT scans of the patient's own trachea to get it as close as possible.  Then a "scaffold" was fashioned from plastic (like the plastic used in that soda bottle on your table right now!), and that scaffold was "seeded" with the patient's own stem cells, taken from his bone marrow.

That seeded plastic scaffold was placed in a "bioreactor" and spun for a couple of days to get the process started, then implanted in the patient, and his body then became a bioreactor, and the cells continued to grow into place around the framework.

Now the patient is home, grateful "for a second chance at life."

 NYTimes article-- synthetic windpipe, tissue engineering

 

 

Living to 100 and beyond--- Wall Street Journal

The article "Living to 100 and Beyond" in The Wall Street Journal tackles some key questions:

1. Are there ways we can "conquer aging" --- at least in the sense of prolonging our healthy  years significantly longer? Not just another year or two, but what about an extra 50 or 150 or 100 years?
2. If we can, what implications? On society, economics, ethics and the like.

The article, by Sonia Arrison, is based on her new book 100 Plus: How the Coming Age of Longevity Will Change Everything.

Particularly relevant to this blog, and my related speculative medical thriller, The Life After Life Conspiracy, are some of the anti-aging and related approaches she mentions, certain of which play a role in the plot.  In writing this thriller, I started with the foundation that all of the steps are based on real-world research (though I have in places taken the liberty of going a step or so beyond what has actually been done yet, and in other places combining research in novel ways.) 

That said, areas of  special interest include:

• Gene therapy, citing the work of Cynthia Kenyon at the University of California, San Francisco. I've been following the work of Dr. Kenyon and her "playing with worms" for a decade or more.
• Replacing worn-out body parts, using regenerative medical approaches to "build" new replacement parts, including hearts, livers, bones, and others.  She cites the work of Dr. Anthony Atala at the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, and that of Dr. Doris Taylor at the University of Minnesota.
• Organ printing--- "printing" stem cells around a scaffold of various types.

Enough. I'll leave you to the article and the book:

Sonia Arrison's article in Wall Street Journal: Living to 100 and Beyond

Sonia Arrison's book, info via Amazon

"Stem Cell Fraud: A 60 Minutes investigation"

In case you missed it, 60 Minutes last night ran its investigation of stem-cell fraud. Actually, this is their second on this topic;  the other was a couple of years ago, and the alleged perpetrators they uncovered in that one are being prosecuted.

I'm mentioning it here, as stem-cells have a peripheral impact on the background of my speculative medical thriller, THE LIFE AFTER LIFE CONSPIRACY.

Here's the link to the 60 Minutes piece.

"Lab-grown glands, eyes and brain parts"-- Mo Costandi's report on new Japanese research

Tissue engineering and regenerative medicine are both elements in my scientific thriller, THE LIFE AFTER LIFE CONSPIRACY.  Though the book is finished, I still to keep up with the new findings in labs --- mainly (to be modest, and honest!) for the satisfaction of seeing ideas I'd predicted coming about in the real world.

In another post  here  recently, I picked up a Wall Street Journal report on a replacement windpipe grown from the patient's own cells, using a scaffold as a kind of framework for the cells to grow into shape. That is just one instance of tissue engineering breakthroughs using scaffolds and a patient's own cells ("pluripotent stem cells," in the jargon of regenerative medicine).

This week, Mo Costandi in his blog  Neurophilosophy, which appears in the British  newspaper The Guardian, reports on a different breakthrough: using pluripotent stem cells to grow replacement body parts without the use of a scaffold.  That is, using 3 dimensional cultures to (among other things) ". . . to self-organize into functional brain tissue. . ."

"Growing a complete, functioning brain is unfeasible , but there is real potential in growing functional neural tissue . . . for transplantation into the human brain," Mo writes. ("Unfeasible" right now, I respond. But just wait.)

This article can be a bit technical for the layperson, but four short videos embedded in the piece make it make sense.

Stem cells taken from the patient: now rejuvenating hearts, soon repairing knees

"For the first time, stem cells from patients' own hearts have been shown to battle heart failure." That's the lead on ABC's story last night on a new experimental regenerative medicine treatment that uses cardiac stem cells collected from the hearts of patients while they were on the operating table for heart surgery.  

What's especially  important is that in regenerating the hearts, these stem cells came from the patient himself (him, in this case reported), not from embryos. That opens new pathways to the use of stem cells in regenerative medical procedures.

Here's the link to that ABC report of November 14, 2011

NBC and CBS also reported it, same date.

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In another regenerative medicine study just out, this in England, a patient's own stem cells will be used to treat torn knee cartilege. That same researcher has already used a patient's own stem cells to tissue-engineer a new windpipe.

Given the reality that a lot of over-60 tennis players have knee problems, the market for that slice of regenerative medicine seems vast! Imagine that: no more tennis knees, eternal youth on the court!

That's in an article in the Independent, by Steve Connor

Stem-cell doctors to trial "bandage" for torn knees

 

"Researchers on the verge of growing human hearts"-- Independent UK (blogs)

 

"Growing human hearts"--- great headline. And for a great first line, how about this? "As I type, 17 human hearts are currently forming and there is much anticipation as to whether they will beat."

This from a blog put out in the framework of the Independent, in the UK, and the author is Siva Nagararajah.

The work uses what's termed "whole organ decellularisation," which means taking an actual heart from a deceased donor, then washing out the original heart cells to "leave only a pale fibrous matrix--'a ghost heart.'  That forms a scaffold on which stem cells are placed and left to --- hopefully--- grow and then beat.

The work was led by Dr. Doris Taylor.  Commenting on other break-through research her team performed, she said --- very memorably, I think: “A member of the media asked me: ‘If it’s so simple, why someone hasn’t done it before?’ And what I realised was that no one had done it before because no one had believed it was possible.”

". . .no one had done it before because no one had believed it was possible.”

Which echoes The Life After Life Conspiracy.  What comes to be in the fictional Hauenfelder Clinic is, I am convinced, not so very far ahead of what will be actual--- maybe not in mainstream labs, but likely in obscure labs in dictatorships, where legal and medical ethics are of no concern . . . as at Hauenfelder.

Actually, Dr. Taylor's work is one aspect of the larger field of regenerative medicine.  As we've noted in other posts here, stem cells are being used in a variety of regenerative medicine labs, with other organs and human body parts under development.  Also, in Dr. Taylor's lab in Wisconsin, and in others around the country and the world, chimeras (blends of human and other animals including chimps, rats, pigs and others) are being grown and tested.

Independent blogs: "Researchers on the verge of growing human hearts."