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It’s the kind of image you don’t forget, like something painted by surrealist artist Salvador Dali, but there it was — a mouse with a human ear growing out its back.
The hybrid mouse was part of a slide presentation from Joseph Vacanti, director of the laboratory for tissue engineering and organ fabrication at Boston-based Massachusetts General Hospital. Vacanti was in Cambridge last week, speaking at the MIT Enterprise Forum of Cambridge. The mouse who had been “lent” the human ear was the product of work done more than 10 years ago in Vacanti’s lab, using some human cartilage cells.
Indeed, things have come a long way since the first organ and tissue transplants a few decades ago, Vacanti said. While there have been continued breakthroughs in bone and skin transplants, growing and inserting a heart or liver remains an elusive goal. Similarly, while transplanting a harvested arm or hand can be done, attempting to cultivate the tissues of something as complex as a full human arm — including bone, muscle, and veins — is still daunting.
I’m reminded of the time when I snapped off the wiper control arm in my car. To keep things simple, my mechanic replaced my steering wheel with all the attachments already in place. It was easier just to swap in an already integrated unit than install and wire just an arm replacement, the mechanic explained.
Something similar applies to growing cells and tissues. Vacanti is upbeat, however. “Vital organs like the liver and large complex tissues, like an extremity, are very difficult, but, I believe are achievable and we continue to work on them,” he said. “The shortest time from idea to a human trial has been about 10 years, but other projects have been and will be much longer.”
Bostonians do have heart
Last week, the Washington, D.C.-based Heart Rhythm Society held its Heart Rhythm 2009 conference at the space-ship shaped Boston Convention and Exhibition Center. One of the major themes of the show was Sudden Cardiac Arrest (SCA), which annually causes approximately 325,000 deaths in the U.S., according to the Sudden Cardiac Arrest Association, also based in Washington, D.C. As the organization points out, that exceeds the total death rate for breast cancer, lung cancer and HIV/AIDS combined.
However, one rarely hears about it, and it usually takes the sudden death of someone like political television interviewer Timothy Russert — whose death was covered incessantly and mercilessly by his colleagues for many days afterward — for the public to wake up to SCA’s potential danger.
The problem is, people often don’t have a clue they are disposed to SCA, noted Lahn Fendelander, vice president of clinical affairs at Cambridge Heart Inc., based in Tewskbury. Cambridge Heart was participating in the convention. “SCA is an abrupt event that often occurs without warning,” Fendelander said. To address this, her company offers a non-invasive diagnostic test that measures Microvolt T-Wave Alternans. Simply put, this is a hard-to-detect fluctuation in the patient’s heartbeat. By measuring the specific pattern around the T-wave of an electrocardiogram, it’s possible to detect if someone is at risk of SCA and react accordingly, she said.
Since 2006, the company has been benefiting from a “rebirth” after receiving national reimbursement from Medicare. Last February, Harvard Pilgrim Health Care followed suit. Cambridge Heart is now looking for distribution partners, Fendelander said.
Swine flu still nothing to sneeze at
Just as the terror for the swine flu outbreak appears to be dying down, a potential local solution has suddenly emerged. Boston-based vaccine developer Replikins Ltd. claims it has a potential synthetic H1N1 — swine flu — vaccine available for testing and deployment.
Replikins uses proprietary software applications to help decipher diseases and create vaccines to respond to them, explained the company’s chairman, Samuel Bogoch, in an interview. To get the vaccine out will require a partner with a “broad marketing structure” in place to distribute animal and human vaccines. “We already have a few good candidate responses,” he claimed, but Replikins needs as many potential partners as possible to make the “optimal choice.”
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