Michael O, professor of clinical transplantation surgery at the Sahlgrenska Academy. He new custom manufacture organs using stem cells. NOTE – This article is machine translated from Swedish.
Incredibly, thought Michael O, when a fellow Member of the United States showed a short film about how she got stem cell life in a utplockat heart. Inspired he went home and started his own project. Barely ten years later, he has created new bodies for many patients.
Five hours before the scheduled interview, I get a text message from Michael O: “I’m going to transplant all day. Need to shoot at the meeting. Can you tomorrow? ”
When the body will you just have to think about. Interview time moved and Michael O go to work in order to operate a child and then do a kidney transplant. Two major operations on the same day, does it happen often?
— Yes, so does it look like when we have to date, “said Michael O when we sit down at his Office in Sahlgrenska hospital’s new vårdbyggnad.
This calendar week is full and also the correct standard for itself: Symposium in Miami, keep tolvminutersföredrag for 500 surgeons at the winter meeting, flight home, two transplants the following day, (“jet lag is not a problem, adrenaline turned on when I operate keeps me alert.”) to assist the fellow in surgery the next day, some paperwork and then stand-by time all weekend.
His team became the first in the world to create a blood vessel by letting the patient’s own stem cells to grow in a clean sheet vessels from a deceased donor. Michael O describe how they took away cells and genetic material and replaced with bone marrow stem cells. After four weeks, it was rebuilt blood vessel ready for inserted and replaced a damaged vessel between the intestine and the liver. It was successful and the patient did not have liver surgery that would otherwise have been the only way out.
By customize the body’s own blood vessels and organs we can avoid a lot of complications in surgery and dialysis. When encountering the body off, and you do not need to take the medications required for a conventional transplant.
The researchers at Sahlgrenska University Hospital have created the trachea with the same technology. The last year, his team has taken out the lungs treated in a box and then undergo surgery back.
The next big challenge is to figure out a method for long term to be a kidney. It is a work that he is doing in conjunction with professor Börje haraldsson to help patients with advanced kidney cancer.
— The idea is that we will be able to operate and keep it healthy kidney outside the body in 3-6 weeks to be able to treat the kidney cancer. The big challenge is to create the conditions required to maintain proper pH and oxygenation in the kidney for so long.
“We are trying to mimic the cunning way in which the body fix this on. Like when the brown bear goes into hibernation and does not produce urine, yet working kidneys. The case for us to figure out how to do this. Michael O think they have come a long way in a short time, and the driving force is that the project is so exciting.
— If we succeed, we can then go ahead and specialsy a kidney for a particular patient, by clearing a donated kidney from DNA similar to how we do with the blood vessels. But then we need to know what signals the supporting tissues send to stem cells. What we are looking at right now in animal models.
Michael O got caught for transplantation research already when he read to the doctors in the 1970s. The last decade, his research has been focused on rebuilding tissue.
— It’s great to get research funding and be able to work in this field with tissue enginering. The development that has occurred in the last ten years is incredible, and I think many scientists agree with me about it. We will have to rewrite our textbooks for doctors.
Text and photo: Monica Havström