Medieval-style 'rack' stretches skin grafts

09 May 2009 by Andy Coghlan

SLIVERS of skin have been stretched to twice their size in a week using a robotic bioreactor that is akin to a medieval rack. The technique could increase the size, viability and availability of skin grafts for treating burns and wounds.
The technique could increase the size and availability of skin grafts for treating burns
At present, skin grafts can be expanded by making cuts in them to create a mesh, or by inserting balloons under the graft once it has been attached to the body. These gradually expand, stretching the overlying skin. But skin meshes heal unevenly and balloons are painful, take months to expand fully and leave scars.
To try to improve on this, Sang Jin Lee of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, took foreskin donated after circumcision and placed it between vices inside a bioreactor, a vessel that bathes the skin in nutrients to encourage cell growth and division. The vices were controlled by a computer and could be set to move apart at specific times.
The researchers found that the best method was to stretch the skin at hourly intervals, leaving it to produce new cells in the meantime, then stretching it again. By doing this they were able to elongate the skin by 20 per cent a day, which after five days resulted in an intact strip that was twice as long as the original. Tests of the stretched skin showed that its general structure was maintained and that its thickness and pore size were almost identical to the starting tissue (Tissue Engineering Part A, DOI: 10.1089/ten.tea.2008.0195).
Lee says they have since added extra vices to stretch skin lengthways and widthways at the same time. The team has also stretched samples of human abdominal skin and pig thigh skin, demonstrating that the technique has the potential to work on a variety of skin types. However, Iain Hutchinson, a surgeon at St Bartholomew's Hospital in London points out that the researchers have yet to show that the grafts "take" when transplanted.
Lee is now testing how quickly a graft can be stretched without tearing. Speed could be important if a large graft needs to be rushed to a burns victim.

Regenerative medicine institute allies with Korea

Thursday, February 12, 2009

The Business Journal of the Greater Triad Area

The Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine has joined with a university hospital in Korea to help accelerate development of regenerative therapies to benefit patients.

The Kyungpook National University and its hospital, located in Daegu in the Republic of Korea, have joined together with the Joint Institute of Regenerative Medicine Korea. The facility, with 35 scientists, officially opened last week.

The Wake Forest institute will share some of its core technologies with the joint institute, and the two groups will develop an academic training program for faculty members and students. The two institutes will also collaborate on clinical studies of regenerative medicine therapies.

“This partnership offers the potential to speed scientific development and make advances in regenerative medicine available to patients around the world,” said Dr. Anthony Atala, director of Wake Forest’s institute.

Review: The Lenovo ThinkPad X300

By Edward F. Moltzen, ChannelWeb  7:30 PM EST Thu. Feb. 21, 2008

It's the MacBook Air for business.

Wait, that's not fair. The Lenovo ThinkPad X300 is actually in a league by itself for several reasons. CMP Channel Test Center's testing of the notebook turned up stellar results in just about every measurement except battery life, where it was OK but not off-the-charts great. Bottom line: Get ready for a new era in notebooks as Lenovo raises the bar for business mobility.

The thinnest, most power-efficient ThinkPad to ever make its way through the CMP Channel Test Center, the X300 provides seven features that give VARs talking points when meeting with customers considering their new notebook options:

1. It has a light design, obviously. It's less than an inch thick (between .73 inches and .92 inches) and weighs just a shade under 3 pounds (2.93 pounds). You can carry it around all day, from place to place, without feeling like you need a chiropractor. In fact, you can carry it with the display open and the system powered up without even the slightest strain or fear of dropping it.

2. Few compromises are needed (Lenovo says no compromises are needed. It's hard to make that kind of blanket statement but it's not that far off the mark.) It's got an on-board DVD burner, three USB slots (two on the side, one in the back) and notebook-robust speakers built into the console just beneath the keyboard. The storage capacity? It's 64 GB which is fine for most business uses, if the business doesn't require keeping multiple 3D projects and a video library on the drive. The MacBook Air (which we have not tested) has no optical drive built in.

3. The display, which is LED backlit, is well-designed and built. It's 13.3 inches, almost indistinguishable in size from the ThinkPad T42's 14.1 inch display. It's also clear and, even taken outside while it was powered up and a movie was playing, no squinting was required to view finer images.

4. Lenovo includes some nice flourishes. For example, it doesn't just have an integrated Web cam built into the screen -- it's got a light that prompts you when the camera is on and working (not all notebook vendors do that.) The display panel bends all the way down to create one, flat device for presentation or extra LCD hookup.

5. The 64 GB Solid State Drive makes it quieter than a whisper, barely budging our decibal meter even at startup. You actually notice how quiet it is.

6. It's cool. Not stylistically, but thermodynamically. Two hours into testing, running a movie, the keyboard's temperature never got above 86 degrees and the fan vents never climbed above 92 degrees. The only way this could run cooler was if it were dead.

7. It's familiar. Under no circumstances could this be mistaken for anything other than a business-ready ThinkPad. In ThinkPad black, it's built with the Lenovo (and heritage IBM (NYSE:IBM)) ThinkVantage capabilities, the unmistakeable red track button and all industry-standard connectivity options including WAN, BlueTooth and 802.11 a/g/n. (During our testing, the X300 connected right away to an 802.11n network undergoing testing in the lab at the same time, and it registered as much 130 Mbps.) It's also ready for WiMax, which we hear is coming around the corner some time in 2008.

So you could argue that it's exotic without looking exotic for the more conservative CIOs out there.

The X300 is set to ship, according to Lenovo, "soon" and pricing information wasn't immediately available to us from the company. Reports have suggested it could range in price anywhere from $2,500 to $3,000 which would, obviously, place it in the upper end of the price range for mainstream business notebooks. (We found one online retailer already taking pre-orders at a $2,999 price.) That's in the same ballpark as Apple (NSDQ:AAPL)'s MacBook Air - - the one with the 64 GB Solid State Drive.

Using Primate Labs GeekBench 2.0.11 benchmarking test, the X300 rang up a score of 1573 -- about on par with other systems running the Intel(NSDQ:INTC) Core2Duo L7100 processor at 1.20 GHz. The system that was reviewed in the CMP Channel Test Center was built with 2 GB of memory, and was pre-installed with Windows XP Professional.

On battery life, the CMP Channel Test Center's standard methodology was used: a video was copied to the X300's hard drive and set to play, with all the power-saving features disabled and the unit unplugged. Under this test, the X300 ran for 2 hours and 35 minutes before the battery died and the laptop shut down. However, a second battery unit can be attached to the notebook and Lenovo says battery life can be maximized to as much as 10 hours.

Count on the ThinkPad X300 to spark other vendor to hasten their plans for business-class, ultra slim notebooks. For now, Lenovo is in a league of its own.

NIH Definition of Tissue Engineering/Regenerative Medicine

Tissue engineering / regenerative medicine is an emerging multidisciplinary field involving biology, medicine, and engineering that is likely to revolutionize the ways we improve the health and quality of life for millions of people worldwide by restoring, maintaining, or enhancing tissue and organ function. In addition to having a therapeutic application, where the tissue is either grown in a patient or outside the patient and transplanted, tissue engineering can have diagnostic applications where the tissue is made in vitro and used for testing drug metabolism and uptake, toxicity, and pathogenicity. The foundation of tissue engineering/regenerative medicine for either therapeutic or diagnostic applications is the ability to exploit living cells in a variety of ways. Tissue engineering research includes the following areas:

1) Biomaterials: including novel biomaterials that are designed to direct the organization, growth, and differentiation of cells in the process of forming functional tissue by providing both physical and chemical cues.

2) Cells: including enabling methodologies for the proliferation and differentiation of cells, acquiring the appropriate source of cells such as autologous cells, allogeneic cells, xenogeneic cells, stem cells, genetically engineered cells, and immunological manipulation.

3) Biomolecules: including angiogenic factors, growth factors, differentiation factors and bone morphogenic proteins

4) Engineering Design Aspects: including 2-d cell expansion, 3-d tissue growth, bioreactors, vascularization, cell and tissue storage and shipping (biological packaging).

5) Biomechanical Aspects of Design: including properties of native tissues, identification of minimum properties required of engineered tissues, mechanical signals regulating engineered tissues, and efficacy and safety of engineered tissues

6) Informatics to support tissue engineering: gene and protein sequencing, gene expression analysis, protein expression and interaction analysis, quantitative cellular image analysis, quantitative tissue analysis, in silico tissue and cell modeling, digital tissue manufacturing, automated quality assurance systems, data mining tools, and clinical informatics interfaces.

Stem cell research - Includes research that involves stem cells, whether from embryonic, fetal, or adult sources, human and non-human. It should include research in which stem cells are isolated, derived or cultured for purposes such as developing cell or tissue therapies, studying cellular differentiation, research to understand the factors necessary to direct cell specialization to specific pathways, and other developmental studies. It should not include transgenic studies, gene knock-out studies nor the generation of chimeric animals.

Spray-on stem cells for synthetic tissue?

26 January 2009

Stem cells can survive a cell-spraying technique with promise for tissue engineering, offering a potential route to unspecialised tissue for medical applications. UK scientists Suwan Jayasinghe and co-workers at University College London have shown how mouse embryonic stem cells can be handled and precisely deposited without affecting their molecular structure.

"The technique allows researchers to build biological microenvironments such as synthetic tissue at a higher resolution than other approaches"


Jayasinghe's team achieved this using bio-electrosprays, which jet a cell suspension from a conducting needle to a grounded electrode upon application of an electric field. The technique allows researchers to build biological microenvironments such as synthetic tissue at a higher resolution than other approaches. Jayasinghe's results imply that embryonic stem cells retain their function after bioelectrospraying Although bio-electrosprays have been used with other types of cells, this is the first time they have been used with embryonic stem cells. David Harris, an expert in stem cell research and gene therapy, based at the University of Arizona, Tucson, US, suggests that the approach has 'tremendous potential for tissue engineering and regenerative medicine.' As the researchers found, the bio-electrospray process does not change the stem cells at a genetic level. Their results imply that the cells remain pluripotent, meaning that they have the potential to develop into a variety of cell types.

"The approach has tremendous potential for tissue engineering and regenerative medicine"- David Harris

'The beauty of this technique as a therapeutic device,' says Jayasinghe, 'is that you could genetically alter the stem cells using gene therapy techniques and then build the tissue.' As well as being used for repair and replacement, the tissue could provide a therapeutic effect, he adds.

Elizabeth Davies

Winston-Salem lands military research institute

Wake Forest University will co-lead an $85 million effort by the U.S. military to apply cutting-edge regenerative medicine techniques to the devastating injuries suffered by soldiers at war. An announcement that Wake Forest and Rutgers University in New Jersey will host the new Armed Forces Institute for Regenerative Medicine was scheduled for April 17. The institute, to be known as AFIRM, will apply technology already being developed at Wake Forest to regrow internal organs using a patient's own cells to heal external injuries, such as the traumatic effects caused by improvised explosive devices used against American soldiers in Iraq. Dr. Anthony Atala, director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine and a pioneer in the field, said the involvement of the military in extending the application of such research is an important development for the future of health care. "For the first time in the history of regenerative medicine, we have the opportunity to work at a national level to bring transformational technologies to wounded soldiers, and to do so in partnership with the armed services," Atala said. "This field of science has the potential to significantly impact our ability to successfully treat major trauma."
The impact will be significant locally as well, officials predict. Wake Forest and Rutgers will each receive $42.5 million over five years to fund their own research and research at partner organizations. Wake Forest University Health Sciences will build a new biomedical manufacturing facility at the Piedmont Triad Research Park to participate in the project. It will be located within the park's newest building, the Dean Biomedical Research Building, and will meet FDA standards for the production of human tissue materials generated by AFIRM. The university will hire staff and scientists for the project, but has not yet determined how many. The manufacturing facility, where the actual regeneration of tissue and bone will take place, should be online by the end of this year, officials said.

Five focus areas
Wake Forest's project team will be focusing on developing clinical therapies in five major areas over the next five years: burn repair, wound healing without scarring, craniofacial reconstruction, limb reconstruction or regeneration and "compartment syndrome," which is a condition related to inflammation after surgery or injury. Wake Forest researchers are already involved in a consortium of institutions with the U.S. Army Institute of Surgical Research on a number of related projects, and have already successfully grown muscle, bone and blood vessels in the lab with the aim of eventually melding them into more complex organs. Mark Van Dyke, the Wake Forest researcher who will coordinate project research in burn repair, said that while some of the applications being studied are further along than others, the goal for the military and the university is to move quickly.
"The programs are set up to be aggressive in their goals, so we'll have things working their way into human clinical trials as quickly as possible," Van Dyke said. He said the burn program should be ready for human trials within two years, and all five research areas should be in trials in the first five years of the program. George Christ, another researcher on the project focusing on skeletal muscle, said the long-range goal of the project is to literally regrow entire limbs, since in modern warfare many more soldiers are surviving major injuries thanks to improved body armor, but are then having to live with permanently broken bodies. "In the meantime we hope to be able to promote wound healing, functional skeletal muscles and restoring functionality on a cosmetic level, to improve the lives of these young kids who have been disabled," Christ said.

Future plans
The manufacturing facility will be relatively small at about 1,500 square feet and most likely be used exclusively by the AFIRM project, according to Piedmont Triad Research Park President Doug Edgeton. He said a budget for the construction of the lab has not been set yet, but meeting the FDA's "Good Manufacturing Practice" guidelines can be expensive, with estimates he's heard so far ranging widely from $500 to as much as $10,000 per square foot. This facility should be less expensive because the building is already there, but Edgeton said the park is hoping to be able to add additional biomedical manufacturing capacity in the future that could be accessed by other research park companies and used as a lure for new tenants. "That's something that would be a bit further down the line," Edgeton said, because the developer of such a facility would need to see more evidence of local demand before taking on such an expensive project. "If (AFIRM) outgrows this small facility quickly and has enough product going through there, that's something that would help us demonstrate that." Wake Forest officials said several state and federal legislators played important roles in securing the funding for the project, including U.S. Sen. Richard Burr, U.S. Rep. Virginia Foxx and state Sen. Linda Garrou. Garrou helped secure $12 million in state funding over two years for the Center for Regenerative Medicine, and Burr and Foxx spearheaded the effort in Washington to earmark $5.4 million from the Department of Defense and Department of Energy for the research. It will take more work to secure ongoing funding to keep the project running beyond its initial five years, but researcher Van Dyke said the most important priority is to move these promising regenerative technologies into the field as soon as possible. "We've been in a lot of meetings about this where we've seen photos of these battlefield injuries, and they're horrific -- it's not like anything you see in the movies or even in civilian traumas," Van Dyke said. "This is a tremendous responsibility we've been given, and it's one we take very seriously."

Reach Matt Evans at (336) 370-2916 or mlevans@bizjournals.com

ABC News: New Prez, New Studies: New Era for Stem Cells?

ABC News: New Prez, New Studies: New Era for Stem Cells?

Obama Presidency: Some Declare Victory for Embryonic Stem Cell Research; Others Say Battle Has Just Begun
By DAN CHILDS and JAY BHATT, D.O.ABC News Medical Unit
Jan. 26, 2009—
As the dust settles from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's approval of the first-ever study of a treatment based on human embryonic stem cells, researchers are now assessing what this trial may mean for the years to come in stem cell research -- and how the politics of the past decade may have damaged their progress. The study, for which California based Geron Corp. won FDA approval on Friday, will examine the potential of an embryonic stem cell treatment in fixing severe spinal cord injuries in humans. For proponents of stem cell research, the double impact of the first-of-its-kind trial and an administration that appears open to exploiting the potential of embryonic stem cells is a promising sign that progress is finally on its way. "I am in favor of anything that will bring us closer to a cure for diseases like Alzheimer's and diabetes," said former first lady Nancy Reagan in a statement issued Friday in response to news of the study. Reagan emerged as a prominent supporter of stem cell research after her husband, President Ronald Reagan, passed away in 2004 after a 10-year battle with Alzheimer's disease. "I am very pleased to hear that human trials of embryonic stem cell therapy will begin soon and am very hopeful that it will be successful so that further trials can move forward," the statement reads. And where proponents were hopeful, some stem cells researchers were ecstatic. One such researcher is Dr. Robert Lanza of the Institute for Regenerative Medicine at Wake Forest University School of Medicine. Lanza is also chief scientific officer for Advanced Cell Technology, which is planning its own FDA-approved study this summer which would test a technique using embryonic stem cells to prevent blindness. "This is what we've all been waiting for," Lanza said. "It has been over a decade since embryonic stem cells were first discovered; this sends a message that we're ready at last to start helping people." Still, others are more cautious in their appraisal. Dr. George Daley, immediate past president of the International Society for Stem Cell Research, paradoxically termed the approval "[a] huge first step, but only a tiny one." And Lorraine Iacovitti, interim director of the Farber Institute for Neurosciences at Thomas Jefferson University Medical College, said much work remains in order to make up for lost time. "It will of course require a significant infusion of new federal money into the field to attract back many researchers who were frightened away over the last eight years under President Bush," Iacovitti said. "Despite the difficulties during that period, much progress was made understanding which stem cells work, how they work and in what ways they can be modified to improve their therapeutic potential."

Did Obama Win Influence Approval?
Naomi Kleitman, director of the Extramural Research Program for the National Institutes of Health, told ABC News that Obama's presidential victory had nothing to do with the FDA approval of Geron's trial. But most researchers agree that the presence of the Obama administration is a welcome sign for a field of research that after a decade and a half of political roadblocks is finally beginning to hit its stride. Embryonic stem cell research has been a field plagued by a dearth of federal funds since the mid-1990s, when President Bill Clinton made the first executive branch move to block federal funding for the creation of embryos for stem cell research. In August 2001, President George W. Bush strengthened the ban on federal funding dramatically by barring federal funds for research on all but a few existing embryonic stem cell lines. What has traditionally made embryonic stem cells such a hot-button issue is the fact that, in order to obtain them, researchers must destroy human embryos -- a step that some say violates the sanctity of human life. But Geron's research uses discarded embryos from in-vitro fertilization procedures, which in all likelihood would have been destroyed anyway. Ruth Macklin, a professor of bioethics at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, said that the influx of federal funds through the NIH will also come attached with rigorous ethical oversight, as it the case with other federally funded research. "With a more favorable funding environment -- meaning, specifically, NIH funding -- stem cell research can proceed more expeditiously and more efficiently," Macklin said. "It will be more efficient since there will be no need to engage in elaborate ways to segregate stem cell research from federally funded research within research institutions, as has been the case under the Bush ban."

The Risks of First Steps
But with so much riding on the success of this first step, some wonder if the spinal cord trial puts the best foot forward. Even Lanza's optimism is tempered by the possibility that such a trial will go wrong, an outcome he said would be "a disaster." And Daley noted, "There is some controversy regarding whether spinal cord injury is the appropriate patient population to test the first embryonic stem cell products; some feel only patients with fatal diseases should be treated." Thoru Pederson, professor of biochemistry and molecular pharmacology at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, countered that "[researchers] have to start clinical evaluation somehow, after all." But all agree that a setback at this point -- the death of an experimental subject or an unexpected negative side effect -- could do more to hurt the beleaguered field of research than even the eight-year stranglehold on federal funds. Bryon Petersen, associate professor in the department of pathology at the University of Florida, terms the trial a "hail Mary pass" that he feels may be destined for disaster. "Pushing the envelope of medicine is what we do, but we have to be very cautious," he warned. "There are new therapies waiting to be discovered, but if this trial fails in a big way it will push the field 10 years back."

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