Posted by Al Gordon on October 29, 2001 at 07:19:10:
In Reply to: Re: DRI Update posted by Al Gordon on October 29, 2001 at 04:34:16:
Is it possible that the comments attributed to Dr. Ricordi at Diabetes Research Institute are in error? The reason I ask is that DRI has been very active in supporting xenotransplantation research. I doubt that would have happened if their head believed that xenotransplantation could lead to "the next HIV". Here are a couple of items on xenotransplantation that I quickly gleaned from DRI's won web site.
Luca Inverardi, M.D. is an Associate Director at the Diabetes Research Institute's Cell Transplant Center and the Head of Basic Science Division at the Institute. Dr. Inverardi is a Research Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of Miami School of Medicine, and his principle area of interest is immunology.
Dr. Inverardi received his M.D. degree magna cum laude in Milano, Italy in 1983 and was involved in clinical practice for the following three years. He then moved to Minnesota to broaden his immunological training and began his involvement in basic science research. At the University of Minnesota, Dr. Inverardi served as a post-doctoral fellow and then an instructor/lecturer under the supervision of Fritz Bach, a recognized leader in the field of immunology.
Dr. Inverardi has a keen interest in the field of transplantation immunobiology and his current focus is on xenogeneic or cross-species transplantation. Xenogeneic transplantation research is a relatively young field and represents an area of study that is likely to receive an increasingly prominent role in diabetes research.
From DRI section on xenotransplantation:
The need for transplanted organs has always exceeded the number of available donor organs, and this is a trend that will likely continue and worsen as more of our population reaches old age. More and more people will live long enough to develop end-stage renal failure, for example, or heart disease – both conditions requiring life-saving organ transplants. This unmet need for organs, as evidenced by longer and longer transplant waiting lists, has encouraged scientists to begin searching for alternative organ sources. One possibility is xenotransplantation, the transplant of an organ (or tissues or cells, in
the case of diabetes) from one species to another.
One of the fundamental obstacles to making xenotransplantation a viable alternative is the problem of rejection. The more distant the two species involved in the transplant are in evolutionary terms (or the more discordant), the more rapid and severe the rejection process when the organs of one are transplanted into the other.
Scientists at the DRI are investigating several potential approaches to the problem. One exciting strategy involves the genetic engineering of animal islets so as to make them less likely to succumb to immune system attack and destruction. If successful, these "super islets" would then go into the next phase of testing, pre-clinical testing in larger models, in the shortest time possible.
Al