TEDMED Day 1 Coverage

From MedGadget: "we heard from a series of speakers involved with regenerative medicine. Daniel Kraft (flashback: MarrowMiner) spoke of the role of stem cells in medicine and how he discovered a better way to harvest them from the pelvis. Damien Bates, the chief medical officer of Organogenesis, the company behind biologic wound healing film Apligraf, passed around a sample of their wound healing tissue for people to feel as well as talked about how the skin heals and how it can be aided by regenerative biology. Anthony Atala, from the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, talked about the various methods his research center is using to grow specific tissues and organs. He described much of the tissue creation process as sort of building the layers of a cake, with each tissue type placed one on top of the other. For linearly organized organs, such as arteries, this isn't so much of a problem, because you can just grow layers upon layers of tissues. However, for the more complicated, highly solid organs with lots of blood vessels, this methodology breaks down, and the scientists have to either use some sort of pre-made matrix or need to harvest tissues from other sources and de-cellularize them, leaving behind only the collagen scaffold that can be populated by cells."

Link: http://www.medgadget.com/archives/2009/10/tedmed_2009_day_1.html

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