OK – People who know me know that I am obsessed with medical advances. This has nothing to do with what I do for a living. It’s just a hobby of sorts. If I find medical news that I think is exceptionally cool, I will post it on my blog.
Finnish Patient Gets New Jaw from His Own Stem Cells: “An anonymous reader writes with news out of Finland, where a patient’s upper jaw was replaced with bone cultivated from stem cells and grown inside the patient himself. We discussed other advances in stem cell research a few months ago. Quoting:
‘In this case they identified and pulled out cells called mesenchymal stem cells — immature cells than can give rise to bone, muscle or blood vessels. When they had enough cells to work with, they attached them to a scaffold made out of a calcium phosphate biomaterial and then put it inside the patient’s abdomen to grow for nine months. The cells turned into a variety of tissues and even produced blood vessels, the researchers said.’
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(Via Slashdot.)
