After talking with a friend about
this blog assignment, I had the idea of looking into artificial bone marrow. I
found an article from Science Daily describing just that. Researchers at the
University of Michigan created a substance that could make human red blood
cells and various types of white blood stem cells. The substance was even made
in to a structure resembling actual human bone marrow. The structure built around
a clear plastic structure that had spherical gaps throughout the structure then
bone marrow seed sells were placed across the artificial structure. The reason
this structure is porous is because in the human body there are blood vessels
that travel through the gaps in the bone marrow to collect all the new blood
cells. Unfortunately this specific substance was not made for implementation into
the human body. The purpose of the substance was to test what effect cancer
treatments had on the operation of the marrow cells because historically cancer
treatment inhibits the function of bone marrow cells, leaving a cancer patient
open to bacterial infections and other illnesses. Even though it wasn't made
for humans this system was implanted into mice and the artificial setup
successfully created human blood cells in the mice and blood vessels grew through
the set-up.
I was actually
surprised that I found this article as easily as I did; I just typed artificial
bone marrow into goggle. I had no idea if it actually existed. I had thought
that people had actually made new cells or something that pumped out blood
cells so I was a little disappointed to find out it was the same cells just put
on to an artificial structure. However I thought it was really interesting that
when this was put into mice that blood vessels grew through the artificial
structure. Because of this information I am confused as to why this has never been
tried on humans. I am sure there are applications where people have trouble
making blood. A person who has lost their legs might have this problem since
the femur is where the most bone marrow is located in humans. Perhaps an
amputee might need some extra blood making capabilities. I am sure there are
other instances where artificial bone marrow could save lives. Another thing
that this article didn’t talk about is other studies that may be looking into a
similar application in humans. Or what the cost might be. I imagine that it
would be incredibly expensive to introduce enough to make much of a difference
in the overall cardio vascular system. So perhaps applicability is why this hasn't
been attempted or been deemed important enough to be mentioned in this article.
I also would have liked this article to go into more detail about how cancer
drugs affect bone marrow cells. I think it also would have been nice if the
article had more explanation of the white blood cell’s ability to fight infections
and even cancer cells. However, I had some previous knowledge of this topic due
to an HIV/AIDS presentation I did last year. Over all I was interested in this
article I just would have liked more detail.
Works Cited
University of
Michigan. "Artificial Human Bone Marrow Created In A Test Tube."
ScienceDaily, 23 Dec. 2008. Web. 30 Sep. 2013.
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