QandO

August 27, 2004

Wow!
Posted by McQ

I've got to tell you, I find this both amazing and fascinating:

A German who had his lower jaw cut out because of cancer has enjoyed his first meal in nine years — a bratwurst sandwich — after surgeons grew a new jaw bone in his back muscle and transplanted it to his mouth in what experts call an "ambitious" experiment.

According to this week's issue of The Lancet medical journal, the German doctors used a mesh cage, a growth chemical and the patient's own bone marrow, containing stem cells, to create a new jaw bone that fit exactly into the gap left by the cancer surgery.

Tests have not been done yet to verify whether the bone was created by the blank-slate stem cells and it is too early to tell whether the jaw will function normally in the long term. But the operation is the first published report of a whole bone being engineered and incubated inside a patient's body and transplanted.

This is really an amazing story and development. But apparently not that new of a thing:

Paul Brown, head of the Center for Tissue Regeneration Science at University College in London, said it's not clear any major scientific ground has been broken, and tests may not be able to show whether the new bone came from stem cells, rather than from the growth factor alone.

The operation put established techniques together, resembling a well-known experiment in which University of Massachusetts scientists grew a human ear using a mold on the back of a mouse in 1995, he said.

They're going to try to make that determination at a later date. In the meantime the patient is eating steak and complaining he can't chew it well because he has no teeth so he has to cut it into tiny, tiny pieces.. On the agenda for later is the implantation of teeth so he can chew and enjoy large freaking chunks of charred cow.

Maybe his friends ought to learn the Heimlich maneuver now.

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