Saturday, November 10, 2012

16. How Close Are We to Making Like Salamanders and Regenerating Our Own Organs?



On November 9th, Torie Bosch wrote an article about the current progress of regenerative medicine research. Bosch opens her article with a statistic about the number of people waiting for a transplant and gives and speculates on the idea of regenerating our own organs or even printing them. She includes quotes from an interview with Antony Atala, one of the main researchers on the subject. Atala uses a comparison with salamander which can grow some of their own organs by themselves and gives an example of how his team was able to heal burns with a spray of cells to show how his project has been improving to help people. He also gives details about a project “to create rapid treatment for soldiers wounded on the battlefield.” Lastly, Bosch answers her question (“how long until regenerative medicine can make the agonizingly long transplant waiting list a thing of the past?”) by explaining how long is the process to approve new medicine and predicts that it will take more than 15 and a half years to start using regenerative medicine even with the help of Office of Combined Products.

The author’s purpose in writing this article was to show her readers that regenerative medicine has advanced a lot and is closer to being used with the public. However, this process is slow and there is still a long time to approve it. She gives several good examples to show how it has been progressing by starting with relatively simple examples to more complex ones. She uses several questions she answers herself throughout the article. Referencing to a TED talk in 2010 and mentioning some of Anthony Atala’s background as well as companies he is working with, Bosch supports the credibility of the expert she interviews in her article and consequently the information she presents.

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