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:
“Eye, gazelle, delicate wanderer,
Drinker of horizon’s fluid line;
Ear that suspends on a chord
The spirit drinking timelessness;
Touch, love, all senses;”
—Stephen Spender (1909–1995)
“The minister’s wife looked out of the window at that moment, and seeing a man who was not sure that the Pope was Antichrist, emptied over his head a pot full of..., which shows to what lengths ladies are driven by religious zeal.”
—Voltaire [François Marie Arouet] (1694–1778)
“For, as it is dislocation and detachment from the life of God, that makes things ugly, the poet, who re-attaches things to nature and the Whole,—re-attaching even artificial things, and violations of nature, to nature, by a deeper insight,—disposes very easily of the most disagreeable facts.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The only power deserving the name is that of masses, and of governments while they make themselves the organ of the tendencies and instincts of masses.”
—John Stuart Mill (1806–1873)