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February 20, 2005
Gene therapy converts dead bone graft to new, living tissue
Researchers have created a way to transform the dead bone of a transplanted skeletal graft into living tissue in an experiment involving mice. The advance, which uses gene therapy to stimulate the body into treating the foreign splint as living bone, is a promising development for the thousands of cancer and trauma patients each year who suffer with fragile and failing bone grafts. The findings were posted online Feb. 13 and will appear in the March 1 issue of Nature Medicine.
February 20, 2005 in Tech/Science | Permalink
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This is great medical science and a grand result. so far it looks perfectly controlled (doesn't run off and convert the entire body to bone, etc) and will be an enormous blessing to bone cancer people, who need a bit of good fortune for sure. The authors say it is harder to make work for soft tissue (cartilege), but the fact that they were ablwe to suppress the rejection reaction to allow infiltration of new bone is huge. Maybe they will eventually be able to adapt the technique for skid and heart muscle, for example, and other organs? That is, implant a substitute and induce the body to use it as a matrix for building a new organ of its own? That would be nice.
Posted by: judith | Feb 20, 2005 12:46:34 PM
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