Medical Theories Are Coming to Fruition

Written by Judith Riess, MTM editor-in-chief

We have beendiscussing the changes taking place in healthcare and a bit of what the futureof healthcare might bring about.  Inreviewing some of the Ted Talks on the Future of Medicine some theories thatseemed impossible a few years ago are coming to fruition.

3-D printing, genome therapy and harvestingliving cells could make organ donor transplants obsolete, as well as solve themyriad of problems related to drugs that a patient must take after receiving anorgan transplant to avoid rejection.  Asa famous transplant surgeon once told me, “accepting a transplant means that apatient will have a better quality of life for a period of time but notnecessarily a longer life”.

Thanks to the research done by Dr. Anthony Atalaand his colleagues at Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine,transplant patients not only have a better quality of life but a betteropportunity to receive a transplant generated by their own bodies. Dr. Atala’sresearch focuses on growing human cells and tissues for use intransplants.  He and his team havealready successfully engineered and transplanted bladders into living patients,and more types of tissue have been engineered and tested in models; whichhopefully, will one day be usable in patients. When he gave his TED talk in2011 Luke (received a bladder transplant when he was 10) joined Dr. Atala onstage.  Luke admitted that he just wantedto feel better and had no idea that the surgery he had received wasrevolutionizing medicine.  In 2011 at theTed Talk he was in college majoring in communication.

In a very recent interview with 3-D Printing’sVanesa Listek,  Dr. Atala said “Today, wecontinue to develop replacement tissues and organs, and are also working tospeed up the availability of these treatments to patients. The ultimate goalis to create tissues for patients. Part of that is taking a very smallpiece of the patients tissue from the organ that we are trying to reconstruct,like muscle or blood vessels, only to expand the cells outside of the body andthen use them to create the organ or structure along with a scaffold or ahydrogel which is the glue that holds the cells together. We have been doingthis for quite some time with patients and 16 years ago we realized that weneeded to scale up the technology and automate it to work with thousands ofpatients at a time, so we started thinking about 3D printers, and began usingthe typical desktop inkjet printer which was modified in-house to print cellsinto a 3D shape,”

“As science advances, we can benefit from leadingresearch in other areas and help each other out,” Dr. Atala said. “Thepace has picked up, because we know so much more than we did 30 years ago, wehave more knowledge that allows us to be more precise in our strategies. Thisdoes not mean that we are progressing faster but the information that we get,allows us to be more precise in how we target our solutions.”

3-D Printing brought a number of otherinnovations to the medical field other than organ transplant use. Besides theuse to create organs it is being used for surgical practice of procedures byfirst making a 3-D image of the patient specific organ so the surgeon maypractice the surgery before the actual operation.  It has been very effective for pediatricsurgery or preparing to operate on the tiny heart of a newborn.

Other uses having significant results are spinalrepair, repairing bone fractures, or cracks and the surgeon’s ability toactually manipulate the 3-D object to have a better understanding of the bestway to operate for maximum results.  Thisalso cuts down on surgical time which is better for the surgeon and thepatient.

Editor’s Notes will continue to reviewbreakthrough technologies to improved care.