Showing how far adult stem cells have come in a very short time, our wounded soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan are being treated with their own stem cells to help treat wounds involving bones. From the story:
With the dexterity of a carpenter, the finesse of a master chef and the tools of a painter, Dr. Thomas Einhorn uses stem cells to do something on the cutting edge of science: grow brand new bone. Today, orthopaedic stem cell surgery earned significant backing from the federal government, which announced plans to dedicate $85 million for the creation of the Armed Forces Institute of Regenerative Medicine (AFIRM) to fund this procedure for veterans injured in Iraq and Afghanistan...Illustrating how the hype overcame reality, the story’s author felt the need to say that the stem cells did not come from embryos. But as readers of SHS know, no human applications have yet come from human ES cells.
Einhorn, the chairman of orthopaedic surgery at the Boston University School of Medicine and Boston Medical Center, used stem cells to try to repair a patient’s hip, after seven conventional surgeries had failed. It was the first time he had attempted this specific surgery, which to the untrained eye looks a little like spray painting.
Einhorn extracts stem cells from the patient’s bone marrow, drawn from the pelvis. Some is used for what Einhorn calls “grout. By mixing the bone marrow cells with protein, it gives me a kind of a grouting material that I can use to fill in the gaps,” he said. Dr. George Muschler, who pioneered the surgery at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, which is a grant recipient, said, “I think [the procedure] has applications to some challenges that might have previously cost patients their leg, because we didn’t have a way to heal their bone.”
It will not take much time for this procedure to become available in the civilian sector. The good news just keeps coming.
