Out of the stillness, soft spoken words
So...David has been undergoing evaluation for a kidney transplant at Stanford University Medical Center.
Stanford, it seems, leads all other US transplant centers in one year patient survival rates. Again! They've also been using stem cell research to help reduce patient reliance on anti-rejection drugs. Yup, stem cells. An FDA study is pending. Wouldn't it be wonderful if researchers were able to develop a stem cell treatment that would bypass transplantation altogether?
posted by Missy at 7:30 AM
3 Comments:
We've been doing work here at Michigan -- and lots of folks have been doing work all over the country -- along the lines of reducing the need for transplants. One idea features building artificial kidneys that, rather than being pure (and not terribly efficent or precise) mechanical filters, use bio-reactor type constructs where blood is filtered through fields of kidney cells, with the intent of having them do what they do in the body inside of the bioreactors. (See here.) Exciting stuff. :-)
-turnberryknkn
Science is just so damned COOL!
Right now I'm at the lab. But back at my place, Elfstone is still running Folding at Home---as it does pretty much 24/7. That's also a Stanford project; it's research on protein structures, and I know that there are at least a few tangentially related research areas for preventing or repairing kidney failure.
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