Diabetes - a long-term Gulch solution?
My research has been moving into biomaterials and tissue engineering the last couple of years, and I have taught that class every other spring (including this one) since 2008. I know there are people out there working on an artificial pancreas. Would you like me to find out more on this for you?
If you can help find me adequate non-mooching and non-looting sponsorship, I would be happy to move my tissue scaffolding work toward pancreatic tissue engineering. Are there any Midas Mulligans in the Gulch with severe diabetes problems? Maybe I can help. I know of at least three significant Gulch members with significant diabetes problems. I am borderline diabetic, and my father's entire family has had diabetes.
The URL above is for a TED talk by Wake Forest regenerative medicine expert (particularly with kidneys) Anthony Atala.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SfRgg9bo...
You can now reverse engineer stem cells to make them act as if they were in the womb.
They are then called induced pluripotent stem cells. That ethical debate is now over because
of this 2007 invention by Yamanaka.
A more basic introduction was on Oprah a few years ago, back when Dr. Oz worked for her.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4Jr6WkRL...
If you can help find me adequate non-mooching and non-looting sponsorship, I would be happy to move my tissue scaffolding work toward pancreatic tissue engineering. Are there any Midas Mulligans in the Gulch with severe diabetes problems? Maybe I can help. I know of at least three significant Gulch members with significant diabetes problems. I am borderline diabetic, and my father's entire family has had diabetes.
The URL above is for a TED talk by Wake Forest regenerative medicine expert (particularly with kidneys) Anthony Atala.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SfRgg9bo...
You can now reverse engineer stem cells to make them act as if they were in the womb.
They are then called induced pluripotent stem cells. That ethical debate is now over because
of this 2007 invention by Yamanaka.
A more basic introduction was on Oprah a few years ago, back when Dr. Oz worked for her.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4Jr6WkRL...
SOURCE URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SfRgg9botI
Of course all of this pretty much leaves out type-2. Type-2 is a metabolic problem. The pancreas is still able to produce insulin. But for a variety of reasons its not being used very well. While the popular belief is that this only happens to fat sedentary folks it is also happening to people who do not fit the usual mold for being at risk for type-2. When people talk about diabetes being a billion dollar a year industry.. They mean treatments/drugs for type-2. They make up 90% of the diabetes population end up suffering from complications more often and all the cinnamon and hemp oil in the world will not "cure" them. Not to say that you cannot recover.. But the path to type-2 recovery is about as different from person to person as there are people who need to recover. For the last 70 years type-2 has often been viewed as the easier of the two. Probably because it can be managed with oral meds. But, I am pretty sure that we are rapidly headed towards a world where we will find that curing type-1 will turn out to be the easy one and we will find that we need to do a lot of learning before we can really get anywhere on type-2.
Which leaves us with the awesomeness that stem cells can actually do. They will eventually be the end all in tissue replacement therapy. In a few decades people will be able to get replacement parts nearly on demand with no worry about anti-rejection drugs. This will result in some amazing things.
diabetes AND autoimmune and its subfolders
inside
http://www.refworks.com/refshare2?site=0...
http://faustmanlab.org/
I just taught about the native and adaptive immune responses in my Biomaterials and Tissue Engineering class last night and had one of my colleagues present some work he does to modulate the relative innate vs. adaptive immune responses for tissue engineering of capillaries. To get tissues to grow well, what you have to be able to do is turn off the innate response. The problem that you discuss is actually fairly (but not completely) general to most tissues. The key variables to turning off the innate response are the concentrations of two of the interleukins.