Stories of patients who inspired the dream machine of the Medical Age.
How their lives inspired the 20th Century and will lead us to a longer lifespan and sound inventions to save their lives.
In 2022, a 94 year old patient in San Francisco entered a period of wait when she found out she had COPD. It came so sudden. One day she suddenly felt ill.
Always so cheerful and the light of the party. She celebrated with social gatherings among her group of close friends who were in their 90s.
One day she confided, that she didn't understand why she had lung pain while she was sleeping and it kept her up and it never happened before.
She asked us to research a way to clear her lungs. The problem was it never dawned on her that she had never smoked and her lungs would be her only organ that would fail her now. She already made it to 94 and had years more to live and was in great health living alone taking care of herself til she was transferred to a place that could take care of her together with a group of friends that gathered every night after dinner to talk about friendship and winded down with tea and talk about the world they helped shape in the past century and how Americans had a lot to catch up to them and all their work for their country to create this vast landscape we call home.
She asked for this. Her friends all looked at it and showed it to their children who were in their 60s.
Pros and cons of artificial organs include:
These technologies hold the promise to greatly improve the quality of health and average lifespan of human beings in the near future.
Organ failure is the leading cause of mortality all over the world despite advances in interventional, pharmacological, and surgical therapies. Bioartificial organ manufacture has been a long-term dream since then beyond the memory of man. Throughout history, people have tried many ways to prolong life through substitution or restoration of defective/failed organs. Currently, orthotopic organ transplantation is the only effective way to achieve this; however, it is seriously limited by issues such as donor shortage, high price, immune rejection and ethical conflict.
With rapid developments in science and technology, some advanced material processing technologies, such as multi-nozzle rapid prototyping (MNRP), additive combined molding (or additive combined molds), decellularized matrix regeneration, electrophoresis, and magnetic adsorption of cells have emerged, making the area of bioartificial organ manufacturing more and more attractive. A common feature of advanced organ manufacturing technologies is that they have the capacity to integrate heterogeneous cell types and multiple materials to recapitulate native organ geometries, constituents and functions.
How to assemble heterogeneous living cells with predesigned architectures, including hierarchical vascular, neural and/or lymphatic networks, while ensuring that the corresponding functionality is realized, is one of the main concerns of bioartificial organ manufacturing technologies.
Generally, an artificial organ is an engineered device that can be implanted or integrated into a human body—interfacing with living tissue—to replace a natural organ, to duplicate or augment a specific function or functions so the patient may return to a normal life as soon as possible. According to the materials used, artificial organs can be divided into three main classes: mechanical, made of inanimate polymers (i.e., plastics) and/or metals; biomechanical, made of partially living cells and inanimate polymers and/or metals; and biological (i.e., bioartificial), made of living cells, biodegradable polymers and/or metal elements. Normally, the former two classes can only partially and temporarily replace and repair the failed organs in the human body, while the biological class can totally and permanently restore defective/failed organs.
