Today I shed the chains of “one day” you’ve wrapped me in.

My Phoenix has arisen. I leave you in the ash.

Thank you Obama

This week, Florida will become the center of the Republican political universe, Obama will try to raise taxes while his administration deals with charges that the White House is a hostile environment for women, whose ideas are dismissed and not taken seriously, and crony capitalism scandals from Solyndra to LightSquared will continue to widen.

On Thursday, the GOP candidates will debate in a FOX News/Google event. On Friday, the candidates will speak at Florida’s CPAC, and on Saturday, Florida will host the “Presidency V” Straw Poll.

The Republican candidates will get plenty of opportunities to distinguish and contrast themselves. More importantly, though, I hope there is more time in Thursday’s debate than there has been in the previous two for the candidates to focus on and dissect Obama’s failings.

At the very least, everyone who watches the debate on Thursday should be—by the end of it—an expert on the Solyndra scandal.

— Tony Lee

Imagine a patient with inoperable late-stage cancer of the trachea who is told that all treatment has failed and his tumor is now so large that it is about to block his windpipe.

If we were watching this plot unfold at the movies, we would seem to be nearing the end of a very sad story. Then, in a plot twist that you usually see only on a cinema screen, doctors inform the man that there is one last chance.

He can have a trachea transplant — an operation with one very big catch. The trachea is not from a donor but rather it is man-made — the first ever.

To boost the chance that his body will accept the synthetic trachea, doctors are planning to “seed” or coat it with the patient’s own stem cells, which should — hopefully — keep his body from rejecting it.

With nothing left to lose, the patient agrees to give it a try — and a month after the surgery he is alive, well and able to walk out of the hospital, cancer-free.

This is all real, not from a movie. One very rarely hears of an outcome this positive, and I wanted to know whether it was a fluke — and what it might mean for others in similarly frightening circumstances.

A WINDPIPE MADE OF PLASTIC

I called David Green, president and director of Harvard Bioscience, Inc., which produced the device (called a bioreactor) used to seed the stem cells that covered the trachea.

Green explained that tracheal cancer is rare, but with symptoms similar to many ordinary bronchial conditions, it often is not diagnosed until it is too late.

This patient was fortunate in that the cancer had not spread. The larynx and pharynx — situated just millimeters above the trachea — were both healthy, as were his lungs.

The material doctors used to make the inner structure of the trachea — called a scaffold — was a plastic polymer, a porous and spongy material flexible enough for the main part of the tubelike organ but that could also be made thicker and stronger to create the rings of the windpipe for structural stability.

To harvest the patient’s stem cells, doctors withdrew two cups of bone marrow from his hip bone, which is a standard site to obtain stem cells, says Green.

Seeding the stem cells onto the trachea was a two-day process that involved pouring the cells over the scaffold and literally soaking it in them.

Green told me there are pockets in the scaffold’s porous material that are just the right size for the stem cells, making it “feel like home to them.”

Once the trachea was delivered to the operating room at the Karolinska University Hospital in Sweden, where the transplant was performed, surgeons were able to trim it to make a custom fit for the patient, says Green. The whole process took less than a week.

A GIANT LEAP FORWARD

This groundbreaking surgery has implications on several fronts that could change the face of treatment for a variety of cancers.

Green says that the technique for building the scaffold likely could be adapted to build other tubular structures including the esophagus and the ureters, which carry urine from the kidneys to the bladder.

With synthetic scaffolds available, there would no longer be the need for donor parts, and the long, stressful wait that has always been a necessary part of the transplant process would be greatly lessened.

Another huge benefit: By seeding scaffolds with patients’ own stem cells, those individuals may be spared a lifetime of taking antirejection drugs and dealing with a compromised immune system.

In fact, we already have evidence that the stem-cell seeding works based on a donor-trachea surgery performed in Spain in 2008.

In what was then a groundbreaking step, doctors seeded the donor’s trachea with the patient’s stem cells.

Three years later, that patient is alive and well and doesn’t have to take antirejection drugs.

WATCHING THE FUTURE CHANGE

In light of the ongoing controversies surrounding the use of embryonic stem cells, it is thrilling to see what science is now achieving without them.

Clearly we are just starting down the path of both stem-cell treatment and the possibilities of man-made body parts, and the future looks bright indeed.

In fact, doctors have announced that they hope to begin transplanting synthetic tracheas to patients in the US for the first time in the coming year.

Source(s):

David Green, president, Harvard Biosciences, Inc., a manufacturer and marketer of specialized products used for regenerative medicine, Holliston, Massachusetts. http://www.HarvardBioscience.com.