Scientists in Finland said they had replaced a 65-year-old patient’s upper jaw with a bone transplant cultivated from stem cells isolated from his own fatty tissue and grown inside his abdomen.
Researchers said on Friday the breakthrough opened up new ways to treat severe tissue damage and made the prospect of custom-made living spares parts for humans a step closer to reality.
“There have been a couple of similar-sounding procedures before, but these didn’t use the patient’s own stem cells that were first cultured and expanded in laboratory and differentiated into bone tissue,” said Riitta Suuronen of the Regea Institute of Regenerative Medicine, part of the University of Tampere.
Reuters via Boing Boing
According to the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, an estimated 15-20,000 people are killed by landmines each year. Detecting those mines—without setting them off—is a dilemma that faces many post-conflict regions of the world. But Bart Weetjens may have found a six-pound solution to the problem: the African giant pouched rat. Working for APOPO, a Belgian organization founded to explore the idea, Weetjens has successfully trained rats to locate land mines by smell. The animals have also been trained to identify tuberculosis from samples, a development that may prove equally promising.