This one is by OldVet.
---
Momma, Momma! They dropped a battery in the Petri dish!
Finally, there is some good news for patients who need organ transplants. Something a lot better than clandestine organ harvesting operations run by crooks in poor countries, in any case.
David Sachs and Benedict Cosimi, of Harvard Medical School, have been working for some time to find a way around these problems. Their goal has been to trick the body into thinking that a foreign organ is really a native one, so that its immune system refrains from rejecting the foreigner. In this week's New England Journal of Medicine they report a small but promising study that, if confirmed on a grander scale, may deal with the issue once and for all and usher in a world in which immunosuppressant drugs are unnecessary and organs no longer need be matched to patients. That would make the lives of transplant patients easier and longer, and might also increase the useful supply of organs available for transplant.
While still early in the field testing stages, these new techniques have proven successful on a small group of humans. To me as a non-medical person the procedures sound drastic as described in the Economist article, but not as drastic as dying.
---
This one is by OldVet.
Post a Comment