Spinal Fluid Driven Artificial Organ
Dr. Ommaya has two children who suffer from Type 1 diabetes. Motivated by his personal experience with the disease, Dr. Ommaya focused on the problem of transplantation of islet cells for the treatment of diabetes. A major challenge facing survival of islet cells is immune rejection. Dr. Ommaya thought that the CSF would provided an ideal setting for transplanted islets due to the immune protection provided by the blood brain barrier. He developed an artificial organ which would house transplanted islets, and the cells could be nourished by the CSF. Ayub, Illani Atwater, and colleagues identified that ventricular-peritoneal CSF shunts provided an immune protected site for the transplantation of mouse and rat islets in dogs and llamas.22, 30 Ayub and colleagues also identified that CSF glucose mirrors blood glucose. Islets cells were able to survive in this system and function in the llama model, but further work on the model is needed.1 Unfortunately Dr. Ommaya was not able to complete this research.
Read more about this topic: Ayub K. Ommaya
Famous quotes containing the words fluid, driven, artificial and/or organ:
“On and on eternally
Shall your altered fluid run,
Bud and bloom and go to seed;
But your singing days are done;”
—Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950)
“Confronted with the impossibility of remaining faithful to one’s beliefs, and the equal impossibility of becoming free of them, one can be driven to the most inhuman excesses.”
—James Baldwin (1924–1987)
“You must recollect however that I know nothing of painting & that I detest it, unless it reminds me of something I have seen or think it possible to see.... Depend upon it of all the arts it is the most artificial & unnatural—& that by which the nonsense of mankind is the most imposed upon.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
“What we commonly call man, the eating, drinking, planting, counting man, does not, as we know him, represent himself, but misrepresents himself. Him we do not respect, but the soul, whose organ he is, would he let it appear through his action, would make our knees bend.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)