Surgeons and dentists often use Gelfoam sponges to mop up blood and help stop bleeding. Could they act as drug-eluting devices to grow new heart tissue?
While current heart-attack treatments mainly try to preserve healthy heart tissue, scientists have been finding ways to stimulate growth of new tissue to replace the tissue that’s damaged. They’ve done this either by getting heart muscle cells (cardiomyocytes) to make more copies of themselves, or by stimulating other cells to become cardiomyocytes (one recently reported study, for example, used genetic regulators called microRNAs).
The next challenge lies in getting these regenerative factors into a living patient’s damaged heart tissue — without affecting healthy tissue – and getting the factors to stay in place long enough to work their magic.
A new approach developed at Boston Children’s Hospital, which could be used relatively soon, takes advantage of Gelfoam, a gelatin-based sponge that’s already FDA-approved and has been used by surgeons and dentists for decades. Full story »
If you look at the range of research models available to scientists today (from fungi to flies to mice and larger), one little guy stands out – a tropical freshwater fish from the rivers of Bangladesh called the zebrafish. While it may be small, this fish is having a big impact on medical science, especially in genetics, stem cell biology, and drug screening, as covered in today’s Wall Street Journal.
As we’ve mentioned previously on Vector, the zebrafish is swimming its way into many research programs, both here at Children’s Hospital Boston and across the country. As a model, they are quite attractive to researchers, in part due to their small size, their fecundity, and their surprising similarities to us (from a genetic standpoint, that is).
Richard White, who works with Leonard Zon in the Stem Cell Program at Children’s Hospital Boston, offers up an explanation for the fish’s popularity:
Here once again is Vector’s take on some exciting trends we’ve been watching in the pediatric health arena and what we expect to see more of this year. If you’ve got others to propose, scroll to the bottom and let us know!
Genomics is starting to provide clinically actionable information (Michael Knowles/Flickr)
Whole-genome sequencing enters the clinic
In 2000, with our genome deciphered, the Human Genome Project promised to transform medicine, predicting and preventing all that ails us. The project spawned next-generation technologies, accelerated the development of bioinformatics and shaped new perspectives on research. But if, say, a stroke patient was asked the question, “Is your life any better than 10 years ago thanks to advent of genomics?” the answer would have to be “no.” Hence the New York Times’s assertion in 2010 that the project yielded few new cures.
Now that paradigm seems to be shifting. Whole-genome sequencing has begun moving into the clinic, sleuthing out problems, offering hope for a medicine that’s more effective and more personal. 2011 saw genomic information provide biochemical insights timely and actionable enough to improve the treatment of individuals with cancer and dystonia, and, in a case at Children’s, failure to thrive and severe kidney calcification. Full story »
Within days of injecting a cell mix into mice, numerous blood vessels form. Can these vessels be made to secrete drugs, without the need for IVs or injections?
People who rely on protein-based drugs often have to endure IV hookups or frequent injections, sometimes several times a week. And protein drugs – like Factor VIII and Factor IX for patients with hemophilia, alpha interferon for hepatitis C, interferon beta for multiple sclerosis — are very expensive.
What if they could be made by people’s own bodies?
Combining tissue engineering with gene therapy, researchers at Children’s Hospital Boston showed that it’s possible to get blood vessels, made from genetically engineered cells, to secrete drugs on demand directly into the bloodstream. They proved the concept recently in the journal Blood, reversing anemia in mice with engineered vessels secreting erythropoietin (EPO).
This technology could potentially deliver other protein drugs, Full story »
Scientists have known for more than a century that the growth of many organs (including tooth, cartilage, bone, muscle, tendon, kidney and lung) begins with the formation of a compact cell mass called “condensed mesenchyme.” But what makes this mass form to begin with? Until now, no one knew. Full story »
Untreated carpal tunnel syndrome causing atrophy of the muscles of the thumb (Harry Gouvas/Wikimedia Commons)
It’s common in medicine for physicians to “wait and see” before taking treatment to a more invasive (or expensive) level. But when it comes to motor nerve injuries, combined laboratory and clinical evidence suggests that approach may be fundamentally wrong.
That would go for injuries including carpal tunnel syndrome, cubital tunnel syndrome (a compression injury of the ulnar nerve in the elbow), nerve damage from surgery or chemotherapy, and brachial plexus avulsion injuries (these often happen when people fall off their bikes; the arm is bent backwards and nerves get ripped out of the spinal cord).
In serious cases, patients may recover sensory function, but rarely recover full muscle function and strength. Lab studies by neuroscientists at Children’s Hospital Boston provide a biological explanation, and therein may lie a solution.
It’s not that injured motor nerve fibers don’t regrow – they can. It’s that they don’t grow fast enough. Full story »
People who have had a heart attack or have coronary artery disease often sustain damage that weakens their heart. Milder forms of heart failure can be treated with medications, but advanced heart dysfunction requires surgery or heart transplant. A team of physicians, engineers and materials scientists at Children’s Hospital Boston and MIT offers two alternative ways to strengthen weakened, scarred heart tissue — both involving nanotechnology.
One approach blends nanotechnology with tissue engineering to create a heart patch laced with gold whose cells all beat in time – as shown in the above video.
The other uses minute nanoparticles that can find their way to dying heart tissue, carrying stem cells, growth factors, drugs and other therapeutic compounds. Full story »
While there is reason for optimism, the April 29 appeals court ruling lifting the injunction on federal funding for human embryonic stem cell (hESC) research will not be the last chapter in the story of such research in the United States. And there are moments in this story that hold cause for greater alarm. Full story »
This two-part series, a response to the recent appeals court decision lifting an injunction on federal funding of human embryonic stem cell research, was co-authored by M. William Lensch, George Q. Daley, and Leonard Zon of the Stem Cell Research Program at Children’s Hospital Boston.
The “for now” part relates to the fact that the recent ruling is but one chapter in the ongoing story of hESC research funding. The desultory nature of federal funding for hESC research has been a constant source of uncertainty for scientists and the general public alike, and to understand the full story, we need to look back to the mid 1990s, before the derivation of the first hESC lines. Full story »
A tissue engineered cartilage tube ready for implantation.
Tissue-engineered repairs and replacement parts aren’t just concepts out of science fiction – they promise to provide the ideal solution for thousands of children born each year with congenital anomalies or who suffer devastating injuries. A study released yesterday in The Lancet and covered on NPR reports on the latest tissue engineering advance.
Anthony Atala, a former Children’s Hospital Boston urologist and now director of the Institute for Regenerative Medicine at Wake Forest University School of Medicine, reports on five young boys in Mexico City whose damaged urethras he replaced with laboratory-grown urethras over five years ago. The patients had suffered damage to their urinary tracts from auto accidents, leaving them unable to urinate without a catheter.
In an approach he began at Children’s back in the late 1990s, Atala and his colleagues took a biopsy of bladder tissue from each boy, and expanded the cells in the laboratory until there were approximately 100 million cells Full story »
