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by hinkley 257 days ago
Any time I haven’t heard about a tech for ten years I assume it didn’t work. I think I first heard of this stuff around ten years ago. At the time I think they were focused on kidneys. But those have a lot of complex plumbing.

As an outsider, who is either missing a mountain of context, or not so close to the problem they can’t see it, I would assume a better tack would be growing ghost arteries for bypasses and aneurism repair operations. Ghost intestines for reconstruction surgery for people with cancer or massive internal trauma. You’d have a simpler organ to reproduce, but in the artery case you’d likely have to also work turnaround time. Heart failure can be slow, but bypass surgery is often scheduled as either urgent or emergency (I just had a convo with a man who wasn’t allowed to leave the hospital after an angiogram showed he was one stairwell away from a fatal heart attack). But not having to harvest material from the thigh before surgery begins should shorten the surgery and reduce complications. You can have as much artery as you want for the surgery. You could have spares.
1 comments
goku12 257 days ago
The article I cited is from 2022. At that time, the principal scientist had left the academia and was working to commercialize it. So I'm guessing it's still within your decade threshold? Besides, perhaps that threshold should be longer under the current circumstances. One of the greatest medical advancement of the recent times is the mRNA vaccine technology. But it's true origin is in the 1970s. They were solving numerous related problems in the meantime, though it could have been finished sooner had someone invested in it as intensely as they did during the pandemic.
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hinkley 256 days ago
Looking at bibliographies, it seems like a lot of the research for decellularization was 2011, 2013, and a handful after. So they were still working on getting a clean substrate while working on how to fill it back in.

It’s a big problem, but still seems like they’re swinging for the fences when they could save people in the short term while working on organs.

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goku12 256 days ago
Interesting! I just remembered that there is another team that's working on plant based scaffolds (cellulose scaffolds from leaves like spinach) [1]. This one is from 2017. So I'm guessing that the interest in the technology hasn't waned yet. I also wonder if any biocompatible scaffolds can be 3D printed, rather than having to decellularize the available ones.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/03/spinach-leaf-transfo...

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