Dear friends,
it has been quite "a while" since I last logged in. I hope everyone is doing fine. I justread this article yesterday and I thought I'd share it with you:
Cells could be taken from babies born with severe heart defects and used to grow living replacement valves in a laboratory, if technology under development proves successful in real-life trials.
Techniques under development by a trans-European research collaboration known as LifeValve would require just one minimally invasive heart operation as the tissue would then grow naturally with the child.
‘We've been able to show that the technologies work, and have secured enough funding to finish the project and fulfil the regulator's requirements for starting a large-scale clinical trial,’ said Professor Simon Hoerstrup, head of the Swiss Center of Regenerative Medicine at the University of Zürich. The cells are placed onto a 3D scaffold and left to multiply. Eventually the scaffold disintegrates, leaving just the living tissue heart valve.
The EU-funded project is part of a revolutionary field of medicine known as tissue engineering where doctors hope to use a patient’s own cells to grow replacement body parts in the laboratory.Dr Declan Devine is at the cutting edge of scaffold technology. he’s looking for funding to start testing his technology in people. If he is successful, he believes he could start trials in people in two years. However, it will still be years until tissue engineering is on offer to patients.
That’s why the TECAS training project, funded by the EU, is bringing researchers from disciplines such as medicine, biology and engineering together with representatives from industry.
‘Getting them together around one table from the beginning … is significantly accelerating the process and shortening the time it takes for a medical invention to move from the bench to the bedside,’ said Dr Sotirios Korossis from the coordinating institution, the Hannover Medical School in Germany.
‘Normally, it would take 10 to 20 years to reach the market. With TECAS we are looking at five to seven years.’
http://horizon-magazine.eu/article/living-heart-valves-grown-laboratories_en.html
it has been quite "a while" since I last logged in. I hope everyone is doing fine. I justread this article yesterday and I thought I'd share it with you:
Cells could be taken from babies born with severe heart defects and used to grow living replacement valves in a laboratory, if technology under development proves successful in real-life trials.
Techniques under development by a trans-European research collaboration known as LifeValve would require just one minimally invasive heart operation as the tissue would then grow naturally with the child.
‘We've been able to show that the technologies work, and have secured enough funding to finish the project and fulfil the regulator's requirements for starting a large-scale clinical trial,’ said Professor Simon Hoerstrup, head of the Swiss Center of Regenerative Medicine at the University of Zürich. The cells are placed onto a 3D scaffold and left to multiply. Eventually the scaffold disintegrates, leaving just the living tissue heart valve.
The EU-funded project is part of a revolutionary field of medicine known as tissue engineering where doctors hope to use a patient’s own cells to grow replacement body parts in the laboratory.Dr Declan Devine is at the cutting edge of scaffold technology. he’s looking for funding to start testing his technology in people. If he is successful, he believes he could start trials in people in two years. However, it will still be years until tissue engineering is on offer to patients.
That’s why the TECAS training project, funded by the EU, is bringing researchers from disciplines such as medicine, biology and engineering together with representatives from industry.
‘Getting them together around one table from the beginning … is significantly accelerating the process and shortening the time it takes for a medical invention to move from the bench to the bedside,’ said Dr Sotirios Korossis from the coordinating institution, the Hannover Medical School in Germany.
‘Normally, it would take 10 to 20 years to reach the market. With TECAS we are looking at five to seven years.’
http://horizon-magazine.eu/article/living-heart-valves-grown-laboratories_en.html
