Word: bones
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...Enthusiast fails to recognize that happiness and the Northeast winter have nothing to do with one another. The Enthusiast relishes as bone-chilling breeze and when it comes to snow, he just gobbles the stuff up. Cross-country skiing? You betchya! the Enthusiast wears fleece head-bands and will attempt making a snow angel even in curbside slush. FM advice to The Enthusiast...
...stem-cell controversy by making clever use of ordinary cells. Today a machinist in Massachusetts is using his own cells to grow a new thumb after he lost part of his in an accident. A teenager born without half of his chest wall is growing a new cage of bone and cartilage within his chest cavity. Scientists announced last month that bladders, grown from bladder cells in a lab, have been implanted in dogs and are working. Meanwhile, patches of skin, the first "tissue-engineered" organ to be approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, are healing sores...
FLESH AND BONES. Treating bone cells right is what Charles Vacanti, an anesthesiologist and director of the Center for Tissue Engineering, has been doing at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center in Worcester. When that machinist lopped off the top of his thumb, Vacanti took some of the victim's bone cells, grew them in the lab and then injected them into a piece of coral fashioned into the shape of the missing digit. "Coral's got lots of interconnected channels for the bone cells to grow in," says Vacanti. It also degrades as bone replaces it. The patch...
...transplant surgeon and tissue-engineering pioneer in his own right, has grown human-shaped fingers on the back of a mouse, demonstrating that different cell types can grow together. He and colleagues at Boston's Massachusetts General Hospital shaped a polymer to resemble the end and middle finger bones. These shapes were seeded with bone, cartilage and tendon cells from a cow. Then the medical team assembled the pieces under the skin of the mouse--"just like you'd assemble the parts of a model airplane," says Vacanti...
Replacement hearts--or even replacement heart parts--are at least a decade off, estimates Kiki Hellman, who monitors tissue-engineering efforts for the FDA. "Any problem that requires lots of cell types 'talking' to one another is really hard," she notes. Bone and cartilage efforts are much closer to fruition, and could be ready for human trials within two years. And what of those magical stem cells that can grow into any organ you happen to need--if the law, and biologists' knowledge, permit? "Using them," says Sefton, "is really the Holy Grail...