Future Now
The IFTF Blog
Can the future of health be far off when it shows up on Oprah?
My colleagues on the Health Horizons team and I are busy looking for signals and developing our forecasts for Health Care: 2020, our 2009 research initiative. One cutting edge area of health that I have taken an interest in is that of regenerative medicine. So I was a bit surprised to learn that Oprah was already covering the story.
I first came across the Oprah angle a couple of weeks ago, thanks to a tweet from someone who goes by the handle @medicalquack (which does not instill much confidence as a source of information, but ya' never know these days). Turns out that a couple of weeks earlier, my "source" had blogged about her interview with two executives from Cook Biotech, which develops innovative wound healing products. Cook's SIS Technology, which is sold under various brand names, is pretty cool stuff—its products allow damaged human tissue to regrow and repair itself. SIS's biologic mesh is derived from the small intestines of pigs, which are made up of cells that rapidly reproduce and encourage the rapid regeneration of human cells to repair hernias, fistules, and general wounds.
Back to Oprah. It turns out that, in early March, her doctor-in-residence, Mehmet Oz, appeared on the show to talk about his visit to the tissue regeneration lab at Wake Forest University, one of the foremost research centers in this field. He had interviewed Dr. Anthony Atala, the center's director, who had shared his vision of how regenerative medicine will change our future by extending our lives.
Right now, of course, we have a limited life span because your parts are breaking down. But imagine a time in the future when, once those parts start breaking down, you can just plug a new one right in. ... I think if we start combining things like better prevention, better care, doing things better for your body, and just with regenerative medicine, we may push [our life spans] up to 120, 130 years.
Over the years, Dr. Atala's researchers have grown nearly two dozen
different types of body parts, including muscle, bones and a working
heart valve. You can watch the video of Oz's visit to Atala's lab here (though you have to watch a commercial first—of course.)
Dr. Oz reported to Oprah that if someone needs a bladder transplant, doctors can build a replacement bladder using the patient's own cells in as little as eight weeks (see image, above). To which Oprah responded: "You used to read about this in science fiction and couldn't even imagining it happening. This is unbelievable." I confess, I share Oprah's wonderment at how far we have come.
A guest on the show shared his story of growing back a portion of his finger that had been cut off in an accident. Fortunately for him, his brother, Dr. Alan Spievack, was a pioneer in cellular regeneration. He provided a powder made from the extracellular matrix material found in pig bladders. When applied to the wound and covered with a Band-Aid for ten days, the guest's finger re-grew in four weeks.
The Medical Quack's blog post also mentioned a 2006 TED talk by Alan Russell, the founding director of the McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine, at the University of Pittsburgh. He had a really good slide of Mr. Spievack's finger after it had regrown (see above). Russell also had some interesting things to say about the role of regenerative medicine in health and health care, and provided an overview of the body's natural wound healing process, which can be stimulated by cellular therapies, tissue engineering, and smart devices. It's all fascinating stuff, and it represents one aspect of the future of health and health care. Check it out!