Replacement jawbone grown in a man's stomach
Finnish scientists at the Regea Institute of Regenerative Medicine at the University of Tampere have successfully grown a human jawbone in a man's abdomen and the implanted it in his face. The procedure used the man's stem-cells, and took nine months.
A 65-year-old Finnish man received a new upper jaw that was grown in his abdomen using his own stem cells. Scientists had isolated stem cells from the patient's fat, and sorted out the type of cells that could grow into bone tissue. The cells were applied to a custom jaw-shaped scaffold and implanted in his abdomen for nine months. Tissues grew around the scaffolding, which was removed and attached to the man's skull to replace his upper jaw, which had been removed due to a tumor.Link (Thanks, Marilyn!)
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That is one hell of an underdeveloped baby.
jeezus, what must it be like to have no upper jawbone?
That is insanely cool. Really, how long before the brain is the only organ that can't be regrown?
It's very cool, but .... couldn't they have built a jawbone out of something else? Say, something that might not have to be removed yet again because of cancer?
trust me, bone beats metal
They weren't grown in his stomach - that'd be really weird not to say impossible considering that's where fud gets et. It was in his abdomen - that's the big empty bit outside the stomach and other organs, otherwise known as "tummy".
Boing Boing is getting sloppy.
Ahhh . . . maybe now they should grow the jawbone of an ass and use it to defeat religious opposition to stem-cell research here in the US.
I sincerely hope that all the names of those who opposed stem cell research will be taken and they will be denied any benefits from it later.
Giggles at Ill LICH. I wondered right away if the pulled the jawbone out of his ass!
/Too much religious school as a youth.
and look what it did for you
At least she uses capitals and punctuation.
I don't think that stem cell opposers were against taking stem cells from a person's own fat tissue. To the best of my knowledge, after it was no longer about using aborted babies, it became a non-issue.
aborted babies now? And I thought it was clusters of a few undeveloped cells. Silly me.
Buddy of mine is a facial reconstruction surgeon, mostly fixing up people who lose parts of their face to cancer or who've been in car accidents. Once told me he fashioned a jaw bone from a thigh bone. Now that's talent.
Oooooo, please tell me they're doing pancreases next.
This is pretty serious awesome. In the future children will be growing pieces of their own bodies and throwing them at each other instead of foodfighting or egging. I predict it!
Also, there is only religious opposition to embrionic stem cell research, which this is not. And since researchers have already found a way to create embrionic stem cells without destroying embryos, the issue is rapidly becoming a non-.
I've got these little clusters of braincells lost to lesions. I'd love to have replaced ...
The jawbone's connected to the...oh, shit.
I could never go growing my own jaw bones...
I just don't have the stomach for it.
@18 made me laugh.
This is great. Especially considering Iraq...I just hope that One Day, funding would make such treatments /publicly accessible/.
Ditto the bone is better than metal comment. A metal frame would be of a different weight than bone, it'll feel out of place. It's like this, a sheet of metal is stronger than...leather, but if you repair a missing patch on a leather coat with metal, eventually that metal is going to drag the leather around it into damage.
Makes me think of Lucy Grealy and her memoir "Autobiography of a Face," about living with facial disfigurement after being treated for cancer, and all the surgeries she had to try to restore her jaw. (ps, none of them worked)
Reminds me of the joke where the doctor tells a woman who's just given birth, "I have some bad news. You've just given birth to an ear."
"An ear! What could be worse?"
"It's deaf."