AP, Wired, NYT: Triangulating news on tissue engineering by reprogramming cells, stem and not stem style.
The November Issue of Wired has what is surely among its most unforgettable covers. The topic itself is notable but not only itself but also the outlet giving it play. Writer Sharon Begley, known best for her wordsmithing at Newsweek and at the Wall Street Journal, gets a health sciences story to lead this tech-heavy, gadget-loving magazine. She also now has her byline on the left breast of what one can only assume will be forever known as Wired’s cleavage issue. For all that, the David Slijper photo manages to show a healthy young woman’s southernmost decolletage while being about as non-titillating as possible. Is Begley the only journalist to have written this particular topic up at length? It is good news and for now mostly about breast reconstruction. But, the report tells us that all sorts of re-purposed cells for other organ repairs should follow.
Fat – in the instances described here taken from the waistline – goes through a centrifuge-packing machine to terrifically increase its proportion of adipose stem cells. When reinjected into the same woman, they form within days or weeks a sort of lipoma, a permanent new blob of living fat that triggers growth into itself by blood vessels. Just injecting fat as it comes out of the liposuction machine, it says here, doesn’t do the job. But with the stem cell trickery Begley describes, surgeons (if they have any sculptural knack) can fill in the divots of lumpectomies and other deformities in breasts with the woman’s own tissue and with a elasticity fully natural. It also, of course, provides a way to modestly enlarge healthy breasts – with applications already underway and mainly in Japan. Begley recounts the research thus far with a firm narrative and eye for arresting anecdote.
The story makes clear that breasts are just the start, and for a singular reason. Women, physiologically, don’t need breasts. That means the FDA has a lower efficacy bar for approving this technique to fix them up. A screw-up is unlikely to be fatal. But women care about breasts, a lot, and there is money to be made working on them – money that can fund further research. Next may come ways to inject fat cells and a potent load of their stem cells elsewhere to similarly trigger fast vascular growth and revive other kinds of tissue – like post-infarct hearts. Begley puts in, near the end and it might have been better closer to the top, that fishy-looking outfits are also moving into the field. Some are making extreme claims, skirting close to scam territory. There also is worry that anything that promotes blood vessel growth into new tissue might not be a good idea for someone who has had cancer and may still have a few hungry, tiny tumors. But it’s good reporting. It has Begley’s usual lively style. The technique, she writes, could provide tissue engineered assistance to “more organs than you find in a French butcher shop.” Elsewhere she noted that on the mammoplasty frontier, the method demands delicacy – “…you don’t take a big syringe full of the stuff from the Celution machine and cram it into the breast as if you were filling a cannoli.” Duly noted.
Meanwhile on the tissue engineering front, two other recent stories provide careful look at this center of rapid innovation by healthcare science. I’m sure there are more such stories out there. Send us some tips and I may be able to add to these.
Other stories:
- AP – Malcolm Ritter: Scientists trick cells into switching identities ; This story provides among the better news reports on recent ability to create new kinds of tissue by starting with a different cell type – but skipping any reversion of the starter to a stem cell stage. It’s called direct conversion. Ritter has some history – the method has been in the news for two years or so – and moves it ahead. It also has unknowns and hurdles. One has to think Ritter’s heart leaped when he heard a source say this: “When we make a duck look like a cat, it may look like a cat and meow, but whether it still has feathers is an issue.” Dunno what that means exactly, but it’s the kind of short laugh that gets readers’ brains relax, take a second, and digest what they’ve been absorbing.
- NYTimes – Gina Kolata : Glimpsing a Scientific Future as Fields Heat Up ; This is from a future-oriented Science Times, November 8, but merits re-mention here. Kolata, in making a point about the hazards of prediction, especially in print, describes recent rapid progress of the sort Ritter is now reporting (in a story he was working on before Kolata’s appeared).
- Charlie Petit
