Like I notice there is a huge push for prevention, which is fantastic, but that kind of feels like taking all the people who are already suffering from intractable conditions and throwing them under the bus.
Like when are we gonna actually get lab grown kidneys, livers, tendons, and all that shit that would immediately help so many people? I remember at the beginning of this century stem cells were all the rage, but I haven't seen anything groundbreaking. Every "promising" study said that treatments (perhaps cures) were "5 to 10 years" away.
We can send a probe to the south pole of the moon but if you have back pain then it's basically "fuck you here's some pain meds but we're not gonna actually fix your issue... maybe try to do some physical therapy and get out of my office" kind of shit. Or "You got diabetes? too bad no cure here's some $8k insulin." And "Oh you tore your miniscus? Well just 'take it easy' and do some leg exercises and I'll do some surgery on it, but it'll never be back to 100% so get the fuck out of my office and here's a bill for $3k." Or "oh it seems you have carpal tunnel and some tendon/ligament damage... i guess you could do some surgey and some 'hand exercises' but it'll never be the same as it was before, oh btw here's a bill for $5k."
Even something not as critical like hair loss (which is psychologically damaging for men and especially so for women) still relies on the good old "go to Turkey to get a hair transplant. oh you want to actually grow your original hair back? too bad, even though we should have figured out that shit using stem cells by now."
That's not even mentioning the people suffering from things like chronic fatigue or long covid. They are basically tossed aside like a bad batch of vegetables. "oh yeah this batch is fucked, oh well maybe better luck with the next batch!"
I know I'm just venting here, but what's the fucking deal? Are we actually going to have legit regenerative medicine? Or will it always be "5 to 10 years away" for the rest of eternity?
Unfortunately you can't genetically engineer the patients immune system when they are older than an embryo. You would have to take out and modify every cell in the body that is involved in immune function, which is not feasible. If this was possible, you wouldn't need the new pancreas in the first place.
Yep, 3d printed scaffolds for certain organs might work, most likely the morphologically simpler organs like the pancreas and the liver (basically just blobs), but the challenge is still how to grow blood vessels in there and how to make sure they have the right tubes. Creating a scaffold for something like the heart, and correctly seeding all of the different tissues is more difficult.
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That involves taking the cells out of the patients body, then modifying them, growing more of them, and then reimplanting them. (autologous CAR T Cell therapy) Only these cells that have been reimplanted will be modified. This is ok for adding a target, like the cancer cells, but for removing a target, it doesn't really work. The immune cells in the rest of the body ( they are very distributed) would then still attack the target, which is why it doesn't really work for treating diabetes. It does make me wonder though, if you could remove and edit all of the stem cell populations that feed the immune cells, then every future immune cell would be modified. However this would probably require many surgeries all over your body. "Immune cells" as I have referred to them also do not really exist, the immune system is made up of many different types of cells, all developing in different parts of the body.
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