Word: fujiwara
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...comes what may eventually be a simpler and cheaper solution. In the British medical journal Lancet, Pediatrician Tetsuro Fujiwara reports successfully using a strange concoction to coat the lungs of 15 newborns with HMD who were not responding to standard therapy. The ingredients: purified surfactant taken from cow lungs and organic compounds. Others have tried a similar approach, using totally synthetic surfactants. But such solutions seemed not to work because they lacked some essence of the natural substance. Moreover, no one had yet devised a way to apply a surfactant directly to a baby's lungs...
...Fujiwara, an associate professor at the Akita University School of Medicine in northern Japan, solved these problems in a sort of medical hat trick that is, as he puts it, "simplicity itself." Picking up cow lungs at local slaughterhouses, he scraped off their surfactant, rid it of most of its protein, modified it with the organic compounds, and put the resulting white powder into solution. That way, with a tube and syringe, he could propel it directly into an infant's air passages. To spread it over the lungs, he just moved his tiny patients about until the alveolar...
Some researchers have reacted cautiously to Fujiwara's announcement, warning that any long-range effects of using surfactant substitutes remain to be seen. They point out that scientists have not yet unraveled the chemical structure of natural surfactants and thus cannot tell if there is any significant difference between the human and animal variety. Fujiwara acknowledges that much testing remains to be done before the cow-lung concoction achieves widespread use. He plans a large-scale clinical trial of the substance this summer...