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Guest Blogger Petrona Lee reflects on Dr. Doris Taylor's talk on using adult stem cells for repairing damaged hearts...
Human beings are approaching the pinnacle of healthcare. It was not many years ago that living to the age of thirty was considered making it to old age. Medical progress has taken quantum leaps in many areas. The invention of such technology as MRI, CAT Scan, Ultra Sound among others has allowed medical personnel to look deep within us with minimum invasiveness. All this has led to innovative medical treatment that in addition to antibiotics has allowed us, at least in the developed countries, to increase our life span by a factor of approximately 2.5. Persons with diseases such as Aids, diabetes, breast cancer, PKU, cystic fibrosis, etc. can look forward to living fairly normal lives due to many of the genomic, technologic, engineering and computer advancements.
Today I received yet another message of scientific leap into not only prolonging life, but much more importantly, improving health and thereby quality of life. Dr. Doris Taylor, from the Cardiac and Vascular division at the University of Minnesota shared with us, what may seem to some, star wars like medicine.
Her team has successfully decellularize and regenerate heart muscles such that the individual is not only able to compensate for damaged tissues, but is able to repair the injury and return to essentially new organs. In fact, she has shown that the entire organ can be regenerated with healthy functioning cells. This is the closest to going shopping for new parts that I have ever heard. A few days ago, I joked to some friends that at a certain age, we should be able to “pick up new parts” just as we can at the auto store. Little did I know that we are approaching its equivalent in the not too distant future.
All kidding aside, this is as close to public health promotion as we have ever been. I can see us somewhere in the future, not only living longer, but without chronic diseases. In fact, based on our genomic profile, we could target which organs are likely to be monitored based on known environmental exposures and regenerate proactively before catastrophic manifestations. We could even predict at what age this would likely be needed because we could do individual aging profile. Is this star wars thinking? Perhaps today, it may be so, but the future may be closer than we think.
Petrona Lee
Comments
I thought Dr. Taylor's talk was the most transfixing of the Genomics I class last week. I was confused, however, by another talk by Meri Firpo, in which she said that adult stem cells had not proven themselves to be self-renewing in vitro. Isn't that exactly what Dr. Taylor has been doing? This may have something to do with the fact that Taylor's lab hasn't published their main findings, yet, but if anyone can enlighten me, I would appreciate it.
Gillian
Posted by: Gillian Gurley | June 3, 2007 09:11 PM