Turbine Charged Man!

Wow, sounds like a super hero don't it? Truth be told a few decades ago and he would have been. Turbines it seems are not the purview of jet aircraft. A pair turbine like pumps make up the centrifugal turbine heart pump developed by doctors at the Texas Heart Institute. That's right, we are talking about a blood pumping device that first off doesn't pump and if it doesn't pump, anyone fitted with just such a device will not have a pulse...weird huh? But the only reason we have a pulse is that the heart is very specialized muscle. Once a muscle contracts, to do more work, it must relax. (and it has to pick up fuel and dump off waste)

According to the Dvice blog article:

• (the device has) been tested for quite a while on animals along with one successful human trial — with no ill effects so far, too.
• The FDA still has to approve this technology, but it's looking like turbine heart replacements might be the next step forward in medical implants.

Check out the Device article which also contains an NPR link as well HERE

Lungs, Grown in Lab, Function!

From Science Now via Dvice comes news of a development that has the potential to put the transplant business out of business. Well as far as live donors are concerned. What's all the hullabaloo? Well for the first time, rats are taking breaths and oxygenating their blood with lungs that are not original equipment. Said lungs are not mechanical nor are they organs from another rat, but LAB CULTIVATED!!!

Biomedical engineer Laura Niklason of Yale University are using a technique called decellularization which involves stripping an organ of all its cells leaving a fibrous scaffold on which donor cells can be encouraged to grow. Eventually you have a functioning organ that the patient's own body will accept as his own.

Pig To Human Transplantation Getting Closer

Hey Shaun.....Of Pigs and.....? huh huh? I swear you were dead on with this!!!!

Science Daily — Experiments using pigs genetically engineered for compatibility with the human immune system have raised hopes that cross-species transplantation could soon become an option for patients with diabetes and other currently incurable diseases. However, many scientific hurdles remain before the ultimate goal of inducing long-term tolerance of animal tissues and organs in human recipients.

Progress (is being made) ... with a strain of pigs genetically engineered in the hope of addressing chronic shortages of organs and tissues for transplantation. The animals lack the gene responsible for "alpha-1,3-galactosyltransferase" (GT)—an enzyme normally present in the pig vascular system. Humans have natural, preformed antibodies to GT, resulting in immediate (acute) rejection of any pig-to-human transplant.

Now scientists create a sheep that's 15% human

Scientists have created the world's first human-sheep chimera - which has the body of a sheep and half-human organs.

The sheep have 15 per cent human cells and 85 per cent animal cells - and their evolution brings the prospect of animal organs being transplanted into humans one step closer.

Professor Esmail Zanjani, of the University of Nevada, has spent seven years and £5million perfecting the technique, which involves injecting adult human cells into a sheep's foetus.

He has already created a sheep liver which has a large proportion of human cells and eventually hopes to precisely match a sheep to a transplant patient, using their own stem cells to create their own flock of sheep.

submitted by Shaun A. Saunders