Progress in Methuselah Foundation's Silverstone Investment
The Methuselah Foundation invests in a variety of companies, and one of them is Silverstone Solutions. Here the Foundation notes a demonstration of the company's product: "In what is the largest single-hospital kidney swap in the history of California, five patients received five kidneys from healthy donors in a marathon series of operations on Friday, April 1st 2011 ... 'Paired donation' is the procedure that makes it possible, a relatively new phenomenon in transplantation surgery that allows for a live kidney going to someone who has a friend or relative willing to donate an organ not compatible for them but a match for someone else. The donor matches one who needs a kidney and that patient's incompatible donor matches someone else and so on, like a chain. ... Imagine that - multiple lives being extended in one fell swoop! This is one of many reasons why Methuselah Foundation has proudly invested in Silverstone Matchmaker, a break-through computer software that makes the pairings possible. It quickly computes the myriad of possible matches in a pool of prospective donors and recipients, minimizing time and effort that the transplant center needs to reach this goal. ... That is why we proudly extend an angel financing arm, funding the development of the bleeding-edge improvements to the Silverstone technology called MatchGrid. This event is in keeping with Methuselah Foundation's strategy of making investments in life-extending technologies that work RIGHT NOW (dangit!) and that also have long term positive implications for general life extension in the tissue engineering realm. Our long term vision for this technology? We hope that its massive and super performance data management system will eventually play a role in the an envisioned 'Postscript' language that can send printing instructions for creating new tissues and eventually organs to be used by tissue printers such as Organovo's sci-fi worthy 3D tissue printer, another founding angel investment by you, the donors of Methuselah Foundation."
Link: http://blog.methuselahfoundation.org/2011/04/hot_dog_a_record-breaking_5-transplant_kidney_swap.html