"Organ Banks." Topic

They may be closer than we think.
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So Gil Hamilton might be preemptively out of a job?

Interesting.

NRO had a piece from the Houston Chronicle on Dr. Taylor back in January -

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That piece is focused on Dr. Taylor and doesn't mention Dr. Seifalian. Of course, she is in Texas.

The Chronicle article notes that Dr. Taylor is hoping to get FDA approval for at least a patch or valve in the next two years.

One of the most interesting points is that they are using induced pluripotent adult stem cells.

Article on Dr. Taylor seemed to point out that production would stay with pig hearts as the matrix.

One of my comments on the NRO piece wondered what that might mean to members of certain religions.

There is no reason why production would stay with pig hearts. Cadaveric human hearts would probably work just as well and since you are just using the connective tissue you could even recover them post asystole.

Having been, and still being although to a lesser extent, involved in the transplant industry, this is a huge benefit to humanity and especially the American medical industry. Transplant, as it exists now, is hugely expensive and a massive drain on resources. I'm not saying it is not worth it at all, but this would be much less expensive on both the front and back ends of the transplant program.

Livers would probably still need to be procured so OPOs wouldn't cease to exist entirely, they might even transform into doing mostly tissue recovery as the demand for tissue would actually increase with the need for organ skeletons.

Very, very cool.

Until it's a reality, though, I'm a blood donor, I'm a registered organ donor, and I'm on the marrow donation list.

I want to be a buffalo: use every part. :)

The question Pictors is whether you could even get enough cadaver hearts to meet the demand.

From the piece on Dr. Troy I gathered that that might be part of the rational for using the pig hearts.

You could easily meet the demand with cadaveric hearts. The OPO I worked for got about 18 organ donors a month typically. Of them maybe 4-5 were heart donors.

We did about 80-100 tissue donors a month, presumably the vast majority, if not all, of them could donate their heart for this.

Currently there are about 3,000 people waiting for hearts in the US.

There are 58 OPOs in the country. Not all of them do that many tissue donors a month but a few do more. Some don't do any but I'd guess that about 80% do some.

I'm guess that if it were just a question of procuring cadaveric hearts to recover the structure from then you might solve the problem in about three months.

Perhaps there is some other barrier that I don't know about but it doesn't seem like it is likely to be supply of cadaveric human hearts.

Even if you could use the non-transplanted hearts from just the organ donors that would give you at least 10 extra a month just from one OPO.