Army recruits regenerative medicine researchers to heal wounded soldiers
Soldiers who survive traumatic injuries from roadside bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan face significant impairments from their wounds. A new collaboration of academic and industry researchers, including at Massachusetts General Hospital, MIT, and Dartmouth, is bringing regenerative medicine to bear on the challenge.
Formed by the US Army, the Institute of Regenerative Medicine will devote $85 million to developing products and therapies to repair blast injuries from improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, and other weapons. The approaches will include work with stem cells, growth factors, tissue and biomaterial engineering, and transplants to help the body restore or replace damaged tissues or organs, according to an announcement today from Mass. General.
Mass. General, MIT, and Dartmouth will be part of a consortium led by Rutgers University and the Cleveland Clinic. A second consortium will be headed by Wake Forest University and the University of Pittsburgh. Each will receive $42.5 million from the Army.
The Mass. General team will include clinicians and researchers from its Center for Military Biomaterials Research and from the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary.
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Elizabeth Cooney is a former
health reporter for the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, where she also was a
business reporter and an editor. Earlier in her career, she edited medical
books and journals at Little, Brown, and worked for Boston magazine.Boston Globe Health and Science staff:
- Gideon Gil, Health and Science Editor
- Ishani Ganguli, Short White Coat blogger
I was thinking for some time regarding the Aids virus and was thinking why not use stem cells to extract healthy T- cells from them. But before they would be implanted into the patient a highly engineered protein called Zinc Finger Nuclease that would "clip" the CCR5 gene out of these T-cells. This prevents the Aids virus from attaching itself to the specialized T-cell. This process should continously be repeated greatly increasing the number of these T-cells. An anti protein that has gold nanoparticles attached to it would be injected into the body and would attach itself to the existing Aids virus. Then a radiofrequency field would be applied to a patient's body and heat up and kill the aids virus!
This is to Shawn Patrick McCabe. Hi I am fourteen and I am in eighth grade I just wanted to know if you are you doing actual testing on your "anti aids" theory? I just wanted to know because I am going to give a speech on what should the first priority be for our new U.S president and why at Trident Technical college and I am searching for a good topic and thought of the aids epidemic.
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