Re-engineering Your Body (page 2 of 5)

New Technology Triumphs

Engineering eyes. When disease or injury claims entire tissues, scientists called tissue engineers can now grow replacements in the lab. Last year, Kohji Nishida, MD, and his co-workers at Japan's Osaka University Medical School Department of Ophthalmology, snipped a tiny piece of tissue from inside the cheek of a 58-year-old man who was nearly blind from a rare eye disease. They grew stem cells from that tissue into a sheet in a culture dish, transplanted the sheet onto the damaged cornea, and covered it with a soft contact lens. Within six weeks, the man could see clearly, and his sight remained clear a year later.

Skin, knees and organs. Doctors can now grow enough replacement skin from a postage-stamp-sized biopsy to cover the entire body of a patient with severe burns. For that procedure, they can use Epicel, a tissue-engineered skin from Genzyme Biosurgery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Genzyme's Carticel, a lab-grown human knee cartilage, gives orthopedic surgeons an alternative way to treat injured knees.

Anthony Atala, MD, professor of surgery at Wake Forest University, has used lab-grown cartilage to cure incontinence. He snips a piece of cartilage from an ear and grows it into a precisely shaped piece of cartilage that bulks up the opening from the bladder. He's also grown a human bladder, and if the FDA approves, he'll begin testing it as a replacement bladder for patients who have lost theirs to cancer or injuries.

Artificial kidney. Hybrid devices, part conventional prosthetic and part lab-grown cells, are being tested as a treatment for desperately ill patients. David Humes, MD, a professor of internal medicine at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, has created a so-called bio-artificial kidney to treat patients whose kidneys have suddenly failed due to blood loss. More than 70 percent of such patients now die, but they usually recover if they survive the initial crisis. Humes grows human kidney cells in a filtering device the size of two stacked soda cans. Humes's bio-artificial kidney seems to be saving more lives than the conventional treatment, according to a trial that so far includes 50 patients. His ultimate goal, which is at least five years off, is a wearable bio-artificial kidney for the 375,000 U.S. patients with end-stage kidney disease who now undergo dialysis. Tissue engineers hope lab-grown organs will one day alleviate the shortage of transplantable organs so people won't have to die waiting for them.

High-tech limbs. Mechanical prosthetics are improving by leaps and bounds, too, thanks to technological advances and the U.S. Department of Defense, which is sparing no expense to offer amputee Iraq war vets the latest in high-tech artificial limbs. The SensorHand Speed, from Otto Bock HealthCare, for example, adjusts its grip automatically, and is the first to open and close quickly enough to allow patients to throw and catch a baseball. The Rheo Knee from Ossur, an Icelandic company, has a special metal-containing fluid that thickens when needed to adjust the knee's shock-absorbing ability. That helps patients do difficult tasks like walk down stairs. "You can program them to be any knee you want them to be," says Joseph Miller, chief clinical and research prosthetist at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C.

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