[acb-diabetics] [BlindForum_Maine] Emailing: Human Muscle Regenerated With Animal Help - NYTimes.com

Mon Sep 17 18:58:13 EDT 2012

Very interesting article. I wonder if this could be of any help to diabetics?

Nancy Matulis
Community Volunteer
Sent from my I pad

On Sep 17, 2012, at 6:31 AM, "carson Wood" <cwood1 at maine.rr.com> wrote:

> 
> 
>  
> Subscribe: Digital / Home Delivery
> Log In
> Register Now
> Help
> Home Page
> Today's Paper
> Video
> Most Popular
> Edition: U.S. / Global
> 
> Search All NYTimes.com   
> 
> Research
> 
> World
> U.S.
> N.Y. / Region
> Business
> Technology
> Science
> Health
> Sports
> Opinion
> Arts
> Style
> Travel
> Jobs
> Real Estate
> Autos
> Search Health  
> Inside Health
> 
> Research
> Fitness & Nutrition
> Money & Policy
> Views
> Health Guide
> 
> Advertisement
> Body Builders
> 
> Human Muscle, Regrown on Animal Scaffolding
> 
> 
> Damon Winter/The New York Times
> Sgt. Ron Strang exercising with his girlfriend, Monica Michna. He lost part of his left quadriceps to a bomb in Afghanistan.
> 
> By HENRY FOUNTAIN
> 
> Published: September 16, 2012
> 
> PITTSBURGH — In the months after a roadside bomb in Afghanistan blew off part of his left thigh, Sgt. Ron Strang wondered if he would ever be able to walk normally again.
> 
> Body Builders
> 
> Second of three articles.
> 
> Multimedia
> 
> 
> Extracellular Matrix
> 
> Extracellular Matrix
> Close Video
> See More Videos »
>  Graphic
> Remodeling Muscle
> 
> Related
> 
> Body Builders: A First: Organs Tailor-Made With Body’s Own Cells (September 16, 2012)
> 
> Enlarge This Image
> 
> Damon Winter/The New York Times
> 
> Sgt. Ron Strang’s left thigh is still missing a lot of muscle, but the little that regrew helped improve his movement significantly.
> 
> The explosion and subsequent rounds of surgery left Sergeant Strang, 28, a Marine, with a huge divot in his upper thigh where the quadriceps muscle had been. He could move the leg backward, but with so much of the muscle gone he could not kick it forward. He could walk, but only awkwardly.
> 
> “I got really good at falling,” he said of his efforts. And Sergeant Strang, a tall, athletic man, had to give up running.
> 
> But that was two years ago. Now he walks easily, can run on a treadmill and is thinking of a post-military career as a police officer. “If you know me, or know to look for it, you can see a slight limp,” he said. “But everybody else, they go, ‘I would never have guessed.’ ”
> 
> There is something else they would never have guessed: Sergeant Strang has grown new muscle thanks to a thin sheet of material from a pig.
> 
> The material, called extracellular matrix, is the natural scaffolding that underlies all tissues and organs, in people as well as animals. It is produced by cells, and for years scientists thought that its main role was to hold them in their proper position.
> 
> But researchers now know that this scaffolding also signals the body to grow and repair those tissues and organs. Armed with that knowledge, the new body builders are using this material from pigs and other animals to engineer the growth of replacement tissue in humans.
> 
> The technique used on Sergeant Strang, though still in development, holds particular promise for some of the thousands of veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars who have been maimed by explosives and have lost so much muscle from an arm or a leg that amputation is sometimes the best alternative.
> 
> Sergeant Strang’s is one of the first cases in what will eventually be an 80-patient trial to grow limb muscle. It is financed by the Defense Department’s Office of Technology Transition, but it will include civilians as well.
> 
> Dr. Peter Rubin, a plastic surgeon at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center who is a leader of the study, said that early results with Sergeant Strang and a handful of other patients showed that the animal scaffolding was spurring muscle growth. “We are seeing evidence of remodeling of tissues,” he said.
> 
> Last fall, Dr. Rubin cut out the scar tissue from Sergeant Strang’s leg and stitched a sheet resembling a thick piece of parchment paper — extracellular matrix from a pig urinary bladder, which had shown excellent results in lab studies — into the remaining healthy thigh muscle.
> 
> His body immediately started breaking down the matrix, which consists largely of collagen and other proteins. But the doctors expected, and wanted, that to happen — by degrading into smaller compounds, the matrix  started the signaling process, recruiting stem cells to come to the site where they could become muscle cells.
> 
> “We’re trying to work with nature rather than fight nature,” said another leader of the study, Dr. Stephen Badylak, deputy director of the McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine at the university.
> 
> Dr. Badylak is a pioneer in the use of extracellular matrix, having discovered many of its properties more than two decades ago while performing biomedical engineering research at Purdue University. As part of his work on a mechanical heart device, he was looking for a way to move blood from  one part of the body to another but wanted to avoid synthetic materials, which can cause blood clots.
> 
> “I thought, what looks like a tube?” he recalled. “A piece of intestine.” So using a research dog named Rocky, he replaced its main artery near its heart with a section of its small intestine. (“I’d have a tough time getting that experiment approved today,” Dr. Badylak said.)
> 
> When he arrived at work the next morning, he was expecting all sorts of problems. “But Rocky is standing up in his cage, wanting breakfast and wagging his tail,” Dr. Badylak said. “I thought, well, this is pretty cool.”
> 
> Later experiments showed that over time the tube had lost the internal cells that are specific to intestines and gained cells specific to blood vessels. “It had morphed into a blood-vessel-like structure, which we thought was incredible,” he said. “Eventually we figured out that it was not the whole intestine but just the extracellular matrix that was responsible.”
> 
> 1
> 2
> Next Page »
> A version of this article appeared in print on September 17, 2012, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Human Muscle, Regrown on Animal Scaffolding.
> 
> 
>  Get 50% Off The New York Times & Free All Digital Access.
> 
> Get Free E-mail Alerts on These Topics
> 
> Muscles	Stem Cells 
> Surgery and Surgeons 	Research
> Well
> 
> Who's Trustworthy? A Robot Can Help Teach Us
> 
> September 10, 2012
> 
> Early Music Lessons Have Longtime Benefits
> 
> September 10, 2012
> 
> Without Alcohol, Red Wine Is Still Beneficial
> 
> September 10, 2012
> 
> Metabolic Syndrome and the Teenage Brain
> 
> September 10, 2012
> 
> Doubts on Ginkgo Biloba as a Memory Aid
> 
> September 10, 2012
> 
> 
> Health & Fitness Tools
> 
> 
> BMI Calculator
> What’s your score? »
> 
> 
> Namibia's dramatic dunes
> 
> ALSO IN TRAVEL »
> 
> Brazil is too expensive for budget travelers. Or is it?
> Saving Rubles in St. Petersburg
>  
> 
> Advertisements
> 
> 
> 
> 
>  
> Inside NYTimes.com
> 
> Opinion »
> 
>  
> The Stone: Why I Love Mormonism
> 
> Music »  
> 
>  
> Time Travel With Einstein on Stage
> 
> Arts »
> 
>  
> At Harlem Hospital, Murals Get a New Life
> 
> U.S. »
> 
>  
> As Grocery Dies Off, Town Lives On, if Barely
> 
> Opinion »
> 
> Prescriptions, Without a Prescription
> 
> Room for Debate asks: Should more medications be made available over the counter, or would this be risky and expensive?
> 
> Business »
> 
>  
> Phone Advances Slow, but More Lie Ahead
> 
> Opinion »
> 
> Letters: What to Do About Student Cheating
> 
> Opinion »
> 
> Disunion: A Gentle Giant Stays Behind
> 
> The many sacrifices of Algernon Squier, a towering Civil War hospital steward.
> 
> N.Y. / Region        »
> 
> An        Unscenic Urban Walk
> 
> World »
> 
> Where        Batman and Zig Zag Clown Vie for Office
> 
> Health »
> 
> Regrowing        Human Muscle on Animal Cells
> 
> Sports »
> 
> Ray        Mancini vs. Duk-koo Kim: A Step  Back
> 
> Home
> World
> U.S.
> N.Y. / Region
> Business
> Technology
> Science
> Health
> Sports
> Opinion
> Arts
> Style
> Travel
> Jobs
> Real Estate
> Autos
> Site Map
> © 2012 The New York Times Company
> Privacy
> Your Ad Choices
> Terms of Service
> Terms of Sale
> Corrections
> RSS
> Help
> Contact Us
> Work With Us
> Advertise
>  
> 
> __._,_.___
> Reply to sender | Reply to group | Reply via web post | Start a New Topic
> Messages in this topic (1)
> RECENT ACTIVITY:
> Visit Your Group
> Switch to: Text-Only, Daily Digest • Unsubscribe • Terms of Use
> .
>  
> __,_._,___
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.acb.org/pipermail/acb-diabetics/attachments/20120917/b85d5451/attachment-0001.html>