Public Faith and Religion, Medical Ethicis, and Transplants
Jack Hanford in Bioethics from a Faith Perspective, 2013
The problems with Jarvik-7 greatly influenced Fox and Swazey’s “new” position regarding transplantation. While I share their concerns about the artificial heart, I affirm a different perspective that includes the successful transplantations which are enhancing the lives of many recipients. Even though the book covers a wide range of impressive research, it “is not an exhaustive or even-handed work about every form of organ replacement” (Fox and Swazey, 1992, p. xv). Nevertheless, the book includes minute detail along with a thorough criticism of both the development of artificial organ technology and its ill-advised use in therapy. Both of these efforts led to the waste of scarce medical resources. Their realistic details show the psychological complexity of giving and receiving organs, the confusion of professional medical roles of therapist and investigator or researcher, and the elevated expectations of patients and families, which technology cannot adequately fulfill. Also, in certain instances the “spare parts” cannot easily fit into and operate within the complex human body.
Sharing amidst scarcity
Erik Malmqvist, Kristin Zeiler in Bodily Exchanges, Bioethics and Border Crossing, 2015
Cutting edge, highly experimental research, in the US at least, inevitably generates proprietary knowledge. During presentations at scientific conferences, for instance, researchers from diverse fields of biotech frequently stop short of providing all supporting data and, when asked by the audience to clarify their findings, it is not unusual to hear presenters claim that they can speak no further because of “trade secrets” and “proprietary knowledge”. The lucrative qualities of biotech (and associated biocapital, such as transgenic swine) hinge in large part on acquiring patents on technologies, procedures, engineered genes and cell lines and associated specialized knowledge. This is true even where academic research projects in the US are concerned, given the longstanding presence of the private sector on the campuses of research universities, alongside the propensity among scientists today to establish off-campus, private, “spin-off” companies to protect their findings from their universities’ attempts to claim ownership. These sorts of developments occur within xeno science, although I have found this to be relatively muted in contrast to other domains (such as artificial organ design in bioengineering). I suspect this springs from the fact that bioengineers are trained in a field that has a long history of “applied” work where the goal is to produce marketable products, whereas xeno experts tend to be academic immunologists and surgical researchers most interested in what they describe as “pure” science.
Metabolic response to injury
Professor Sir Norman Williams, Professor P. Ronan O’Connell, Professor Andrew W. McCaskie in Bailey & Love's Short Practice of Surgery, 2018
In essence, the concept evolved that the constancy of the ‘milieu interieur’ allowed for the independence of organisms, that complex homeostatic responses sought to maintain this constancy, and that within this range of responses were the elements of healing and repair. These ideas pertained to normal physiology and mild/moderate injury. In the modern era, such concepts do not account for disease evolution following major injury/sepsis or the injured patient who would have died but for artificial organ support. Such patients exemplify less of the classical homeostatic control system (signal detector-processor-effector regulated by a negative feedback loop) and more of the ‘open loop’ system, whereby only with med- ical/surgical resolution of the primary abnormality is a return to classical homeostasis possible.
Advances in the clinical use of collagen as biomarker of liver fibrosis
Published in Expert Review of Molecular Diagnostics, 2020
Steffen K. Meurer, Morten A. Karsdal, Ralf Weiskirchen
The extracellular matrix (ECM) scaffold offers a structural, biochemical, and biomechanical architecture to guide and regulate cell attributes and tissue development. The ‘core matrisome’ in mammals comprises ~300 proteins including 43 collagens in human [1,2]. This set of proteins is ‘functionally’ completed by the group of ECM-modifying enzymes and other ECM-associated proteins [2,3]. This scaffold alone is sufficient and necessary to provide a platform to generate a complete bioartificial organ by a technique called cell-on-scaffold technology [3]. This method relies on the detergent perfusion of an organ leading to a decellularized ‘ghost’ organ composed only of ECM. This ECM-based scaffold provides not only a structural support to the native anatomy but also supplies important biological molecules that support cellular proliferation during the recellularization process [4]. In addition, it has been shown that the ECM of a decellularized liver contains cues/factors to keep, for example, liver sinusoidal endothelial liver cells (LSEC) in a vital functional state. This biological activity cannot be supplied by ECM from other organs like bladder or small intestine suggesting that ECM is not only a simple scaffold which casts the organ shape [5].
Acute radiation syndrome drug discovery using organ-on-chip platforms
Published in Expert Opinion on Drug Discovery, 2022
Vijay K. Singh, Thomas M. Seed
During the last two decades, investigators have strived to reconstruct elemental organs by combining primary cells of organs using promising state-of-the-art technologies, with the goal of exploiting these artificial organ-constructs for drug discovery and development while minimizing the high attrition rate for new drugs during the multi-stepped, complex testing processes required for regulatory approval. With continuous improvements, such devices have evolved in both design and function from simple concepts to practical applications for preclinical drug discovery and development [1–3]. Advances in three-dimensional (3D) cell biology and tissue engineering have yielded critical insights in the building of robust systems and devices that often simulate form and function of human tissues [4–6].
Prolongation of liver-specific function for primary hepatocytes maintenance in 3D printed architectures
Published in Organogenesis, 2018
Yohan Kim, Kyojin Kang, Sangtae Yoon, Ji Sook Kim, Su A. Park, Wan Doo Kim, Seung Bum Lee, Ki-Young Ryu, Jaemin Jeong, Dongho Choi
Artificial organ transplantation is an outstanding recent challenge in medicine as liver transplantation is deemed the best therapeutic method for severe liver diseases. However, most transplant patients die due to surgical complications, donor organ shortage and rejection risk.1,2 To resolve this, many scientists are attempting to develop artificial organs. In the case of an artificial liver, a major obstacle is the limited culture time for primary hepatocytes. After isolation for 3 days, the apoptotic pathway becomes activated in primary hepatocytes and they differentiate into fibrotic cells.3 For this reason, increasing the culture time for primary hepatocytes is a major challenge that must be overcome in order to make artificial livers.
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