Saturday, May 17, 2003
PROGRESS WITH MECHANICAL HEART (?)
The Houston Chronicle is reporting today that a second patient has received the redesigned Abiomed mechanical heart implant. After some initial success, the test program experienced setbacks when all patients receiving the heart eventually died from strokes or other problems. This story indicates that there has been a subsequent redesign. Perhaps they've licked the stroke problem. I hope so. This device might be just the kind of stopgap needed until truly new hearts -- and other organs -- can be cloned from a patient's own cells (thus bypassing the rejection problem with transplanted human and pig hearts).
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 4:30 PM
