Essay On Scaffolds

Many of us have all heard the saying that a “lizard can lose its tail,” and bizarrely enough it will grow back. This was always considered impossible for humans, an idea belonging in the realm of science fiction, but now the regeneration of tissue is an extremely realistic possibility. Despite some opinions, this process does not happen naturally, or take place as cinematically as one might imagine. Over the past decade, there have been major advances in regenerative medicine, commonly known as stem cell research. Stem cells are undifferentiated cells within the body that have the capability to specialize into any tissue. They are most commonly found in cord blood, bone marrow, organ donations, placenta, and embryos . Stem cells are seen by some as a new miracle treatment, encouraging many countries to invest in their research.

Tissue engineering is an emerging interdisciplinary field that uses principles from engineering, biology and chemistry in an effort towards tissue regeneration. The main draw of tissue engineering is the regeneration of a patient’s own tissues and organs free from low biofunctionality and poor biocompatibility and serious immune rejection. As medical care continues to improve and life expectancy continues to grow, organ shortages become more problematic.(Manufacturing living things) According to organdonor.gov, a patient is added to the waiting list every 10 minutes and an average of 18 people die everyday waiting for an organ donation. The “nirvana” of tissue engineering is to replace the need for organ donation altogether. This could be achieved using scaffolding from

The recovery period after large scale injuries could be shortened. The effects are analyzed in an article that states, “True healing could occur thanks to the cloning of their own cells to help the recovery process” (“Pros and Cons” 5). Basically, the process of cloning healthy cells could be used as an aid in replenishing damage of unhealthy cells. This process, if it were to be actualized, could help recovery progress in anything from pulled muscles to the paralysis of an entire limb. In theory, the same research can be applied in other areas. If this technology is paired with stem cell research, it could result in a method of repairing physical damage. An article that focused on advances in biotechnology stated that “Another use of cloned stem cells could be the growth of replacement tissues in the laboratory” (LaPensee 15). Necrosis, apoptosis, and lymphocyte diapedesis all cause tissue damage or death. These tissues could be replaced by cloned cells of healthy tissues. This shortens recovery periods and leads to healthier tissue growth.

Adult stem cells have already proven to be successful in treating diseases and have helped hundreds of thousands of patients, and new clinical uses expand almost weekly. Adult stem cells can be obtained from cord blood, fat, neural tissue, muscle, bone marrow, placental and skin cells. Adult stem cells are increasingly being shown to have a similar and perhaps an identical capacity to become cells of other types. There is a possibility that adult stem cells may function more efficiently and more safely than embryonic cells. Treena Arinzeh, a young professor who last year won a Presidential Award, the nation's highest scientific honor, is bringing the promise of stem cell research one step closer to reality. Adult stem cells also have a unique trait that lends them their magic: Under the right conditions, or given the proper signals, they have the ability to turn into different cell types. Arinzeh is doing exactly that: developing signals, in the form of biomaterials, that will help adult stem cells turn into cells that, if injected into a diseased area of the human body, could regenerate damaged tissue. Her research has also led to two major stem-cell discoveries: One showing that stem cells, when mixed with biomaterials known as scaffolds, can help regenerate bone growth; and another proving that stem cells taken from one person can be successfully implanted into another. A list of conditions for which stem-cell treatment holds promise grows almost daily: It now

Hinnah Abid: PhD student in Biomedical Sciences with a focus in Clinical and Translational Sciences at Mayo Graduate School. Interested in tissue regeneration and diagnostic devices. Graduated from University of Wisconsin, Madison, with a Bachelor of Science in Biomedical Engineering.

The focal lesion created by condition #2 alongside the larger size of the guinea pig (brainstem?) would facilitate the assessment of tonotopicity for any stem cell based treatment for SGN or HC replacement.

As an undergraduate, I performed research on deafness, investigating hearing regeneration and unique auditory phenotypes. Based on my work, I was selected to be a Post-Baccalaureate Fellow at the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders within the National Institutes of Health. This is a two-year program (07/14-07/16). I lead three projects focused on novel clinical therapies to prevent hearing loss from ototoxic drugs—drugs that cause hearing loss in hundreds of thousands of patients. There exists the need for therapies that protect the inner ear from ototoxic drugs without altering their therapeutic effects, and the focus of my research has been to help develop novel therapies.

As today’s technology is changing, some of the most major effects of it are superior advances in the medical field. One advance in the medical field is tissue engineering. It is being developed for use in regenerative medicine and soon to be in wider use for other treatments. Tissue engineering’s goal for the future is for the medicine to be able to stimulate other cells around the damage area of the body to get them to grow and produce living tissue (Sciencedaily). Another medical advancement is the monitoring systems and how hospitals can better track for problems and signs of an emergency. This can also help the surgeons decide how to stitch up a patient for best recovery time (Sciencedaily). As technology keeps progressing, another medical advancement is the way surgeons are doing operations. Today, for complex surgeries, surgeons now will get help from the use of a robot for accurate procedures; this will help with the size of the incision and keep the recovery time shorter than during standard surgery.

The background of this report is based on the controversy surrounding thoracic surgeon, Paolo Macchiarini. Macchiarini grew a reputation as a star surgeon for his work involving ground-breaking trachea transplants. He was viewed as a forerunner in the field of regenerative medicine using both synthetic and biological scaffolds as trachea transplants. The transplants were seeded with the patients own stem cells taken from bone marrow and placed in a machine where it rotated in a solution designed to encourage cell growth. The impression was that the cells would divide and turn into tracheal cells. These “plastic” trachea transplants proved deadly for his patients. Of the seven patients that received the treatment, seven have died. The other

Organ shortages prove to be one of today’s most major health crises and has become a driving force for advancement in transplant medicine. There are nowhere near enough living and deceased organ donors combined to meet the demand of needed organ transplants. As a result, molecular and cell biologists are pushing to explore new areas in regenerative medicine. The alternative to tissue and organ shortage is cell transplantation and tissue engineering, which leads to the cloning and creation of human tissues and whole organs. Organ cloning holds the most promise of providing more organs, and in turn, reducing the number of lives that are lost due to the shortage of organ donors.

The combination of bone grafting and membrane barriers has made it possible to regenerate bone in areas that were at one time considered hopeless. Furcations, the areas between tooth roots, are one example. In previous decades, it would have been considered almost impossible to grow new bone there. However, the combination of bone grafting with membrane barriers amplifies support for teeth, decreasing the chances of tooth loss in such cases.

The most important issue with trauma injuries is time since there is the lack of protection of the brain on the missing part of the skull. Typical implant wait time for a surgeon is 4-6 weeks; impressively the delay time is reduced to 5 days with our approach after getting an order from hospitals. Moreover, getting the precise shape and size of the implant was a challenge previously, but with the use of Computer-Aided Design (CAD) and Selective Laser Sintering (SLS) technologies, we are able to overcome these problems in our method. There are some limitations for facial constructs such as, pore sizes, biodegradability, drug delivery, growth factors, and biocompatibility. One of the challenges in facial reconstruction is finding the right scaffold

Lately, there is an emerging innovation whereby organs are created to form and increase in size by a process of inorganic accretion, from the patient’s cell. This field of medicine is known as the regenerative medicine. In addition to this, there are basically various types of regenerative medical

Barzegari, Abolfazl and Amir Ata Saei. "Tissue Engineering in Microgravity Bioreactors." BioImpacts 2.1 (2012): 23-32. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 24 October 2014.

By combining this technology with human cloning technology it may be possible to produce needed tissue for suffering people that will be free of rejection by their immune systems. Conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease Parkinson’s disease, diabetes, heart failure, and other problems may be made curable by human cloning. (“Cloning to Save Lives”)