Synthetic tissue can repair hearts, muscles, and vocal cords | Hacker News Reader

Synthetic tissue can repair hearts, muscles, and vocal cords

mcgill.ca

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I'm still waiting for one of those breakthroughs we've been hearing for 20 years to actually make it to market.

Specifically in the teeth recuperation department.

Or the cochlear hair cell department.

oh man, this would be huge. Again one of those parts of the body that doesn't regenerate

or regular hair cell department

Something gives me the feeling someone would have cured baldness like 50 years ago if it actually caused health problems for people.

Can you imagine how much money a cure for baldness is worth? Rest assured if it was simple modern pharma would’ve done it.

It would be worth quite a bit, but it would have to be comparable to either rogaine or hair transplant surgery. Hairline surgery isn't worth the money for most men, but they wouldn't even blink paying that much for cancer treatment. If it were comparable to rogaine in price it wouldn't be as much of a cash cow since they're making less per sale and maybe making fewer sales because it cures the problem. And if I remember correctly, we only have finasteride/minoxidil for hair loss because they were originally used for high blood pressure

I am bald, not totally but enough to shave my head. I would love to have simple solution for this problem. And I would pay gladly a lot of money if this would be a one time thing. Or let's say every coule of years. But I have seen friend having his hair transplanted, it is not much hair in one sitting. And after one year of growing that hair, for me it is like meh, I wouldn't bother. He does not take pills as far as I know. To have a good enough hair, you need to have couple of very unpleasant transplantations and take pills with side effects for a long time(maybe for ever). For me it is not worth the hustle at all. So while I passively lurk for better treatment I shave my head 2 times a week and don't waste energy on thinking what if. I know some people have big mental problems considering hairloss. I am glad I can grow a beard and I am tall, so it does not make me look bad. It is just a different look. There is a lot of baldness acceptance videos going on during this pandemic, for example bald caffe on youtube. I think it can help a lot of people deal with issues. So, not a problem of money but it is a hustle to get it done right.

The few I've read don't hint at much money being thrown at the problem. Books often start by "we know very few about hairs".. not "we have all the data anyone would ever want but the problem is really hard to solve".

My two cents

Elon Musk used to be bald. He is no longer bald. We have drugs to stop hairloss and surgery to reverse it.

https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/hair-loss/dia...

Something gives me the feeling someone would have cured cancer/hiv/starvation/mental illness like 50 years ago if it actually caused health problems for people.

What on earth are you talking about. Some dudes rock the bald look by choice. Cancer will literally kill you if you don't pay to get it treated.

This has nothing to do with your original assertion that the lack of cures for male pattern baldness is due to a lack of health problems associated with the condition and not because it remains an intractable problem with hack treatments that have only recently become moderately suitable.

I don't know if this was clear to you, but the link was no associated health problems -> less funding for research -> no available cure. I'm sure hairline surgery would be a lot more popular and people wouldn't balk at the cost nearly as much if the surgery added 20 years to your lifespan

This entire argument hinges on the assumption that male pattern baldness is curable with 50 year old technology. If someone could prove that then they could develop a treatment with 50 year old technology.

What's far more likely is that the 'cure' for baldness will be the merger 21st century technologies including tissue engineering and genetic modification to make perfect and long lasting hair follicles for automated transplantation.

The argument you're presenting is akin to saying that people in the 15th century didn't go to the moon because there wasn't an economic purpose for doing it and not because there is no way to go to the moon with craft made of wood and iron.

Only hope is to wait another 20 years for something like Neuralink

It won't exactly regrow teeth, but I swear by BioMin for enamel repair/protection. It's completely treated the sensitivity I'd had in a few teeth, and my teeth as a whole just generally feel stronger since I started using it in July.

I'm pretty sure I heard about it in an HN thread actually. It's not available OTC in the US just yet (except as a fluoride-free variant), but I've been buying it from a Canadian site with no issues: https://www.healthpulze.ca/collections/biomin-toothpaste

Do you know what its ingredient is? I’ve been looking for a nano-Hydroxypatite recently

It's a "bioactive glass" (AKA "bioglass"), like the NovaMin toothpaste that Sensodyne used to sell in the US. Specifically:

https://biomin.co.uk/products/biominr-f-toothpaste

The award winning new formula used in BioMin® F toothpaste slowly releases Calcium, Phosphate and Fluoride ions. These combine to form Fluorapatite in and around exposed dentine tubules to reduce sensitivity and strengthen and protect tooth structure.

https://biomin.co.uk/products/biominr-c-toothpaste

BioMin® C the FLUORIDE FREE daily toothpaste formulated to adhere to the tooth surface and slowly release mineral ions in a similar manner to BioMin® F - only without the fluoride and much faster – to produce a hydroxyapatite coating.

Are they absolutely certain that if accidentally ingested (or ingested in miniscule amounts), that this won't interact with endothelial surfaces or have other undesired affects?

The mechanism scares me. I'd be worried about vascular health, cancer, etc. Probably nothing to worry about, but it's a very novel approach and it's got my mind wondering.

It contains titanium dioxide, for which there are plans to ban it across EU. Though, there isn't anything definitive about it like "you need such and such exposure for so many years to increase your risk of getting cancer by X%".

my impression: (maybe a dentist could chime in) It’s rare that we need to replace teeth because the repair of teeth has gotten so good that for the most part. So long as you are able to get to a decent dentist, they can fix them well enough you shouldn’t need to ever to regrow anything.

Not a dentist, but I've lost a couple of teeth to bruxism - they were cracked all the way down to the roots. The endodontist told me there was nothing that could be done to fix them. Got one of them replaced with an implant. I wear a mouth guard now when I sleep so that things don't get worse. Since I suspect there are maybe a couple other teeth that could be have the same problem I'd very much like it if there were some way to regrow teeth.

If you can afford it check out botox as a treatment/cure for bruxism. Treatment is approximately $500 and you will have temporary relief for 4-6 months. Some say that after 3 treatments you can be cured.

Is it that rare or do you just live somewhere where it's rare? I see people with missing teeth all the time, and I'm sure I see a lot more with suboptimal replacements that look like teeth but really aren't.

There's "need" and there's what we might want to do. I have lots of crowns and if my dentists could have cleaned out damage and made the tooth regrow instead that'd have been preferable to having to do more and more invasive repairs.

Modern dentistry has come very far, but it's not perfect.

That 'so long as you are able to' is doing an awful lot of work there.

Looks like it was approved by the US FDA this year.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41415-021-2714-8

It was, but unless something has changed in the last few months it's 1) prescription-only, and 2) not actually available for sale anywhere even if you have a prescription.

Interesting...I've been using a lot of different products, including nano hap which rebuilds the enamel from the inside out while I try to resolve my gum disease, but I like the idea that it slowly releases fluoride, phosphorous, calcium over 12 hours instead of one.

Ordering it now.

Thank you.

I knew about Novamin on toothpaste, but BioMin seems great too !

I use vitis, and also is very low on the abrasive index. I just don’t like it has SLS, cause it damages my tongue etc

I've read so many headlines like this. True to form, in the article they describe no actual tissue repair. They describe instead an experiment in which the hydrogel is tested in conditions mimicking the stress that vocal cords undergo, and holds together where other materials cannot.

Synthetic cartilage is what we really need, and there’s a huge market for it.

I don't understand why there's so much focus on muscles and bones. Every orthopedist I've known says that cartilage repair is the holy grail.

Cardiac muscle, organ tissue, and cartilage. Wouldn't make us immortal, but would massively improve quality of life.

Exactly. Muscles and bones are nothing without good cartilage, and the fact is cartilage wears down over time and doesn’t get repaired, and I think this is one of the key reasons people feel “old”.

Yeah. Osteoartritis is a condition that has virtually no good treatment.

Bioengineer here able to chime in with niche expertise. Cartilage is and has been a holy grail in biomedical engineering but is very difficult to grow and transplant. There have been some successful neo-cartilage projects but integrating that into a defect and successfully integrating with host cartilage is the problem. The boundary of the defect actually has electronegative components that actively oppose integration of host and transplant (synthetic) cartilage. I think the most likely solution won't be a tissue-engineered transplant but rather an active cellular component that appropriately responds, and builds upon, this negative feedback cycle via cellular programming.

Could we harvest cartilage from other animals? Such as pigs perhaps.

I think cadavers are the typical source. Since there's no blood vessels in it, tissue rejection isn't as much of a concern.

That's a strategy but there are issues with immune rejection since that's a xenograft. I think there are some products based off of this concept for other areas (skin grafts) after removing all xeno-cells from the tissue, but articular cartilage is more difficult to remove/replace xeno-cells with autologous or allogenic cells.

Growth hormone? It's just not without risks.

Cancer from soft tissues (sarcoma) has a high mortality rate. Even a very low risk of getting it from growth hormones would drastically limit their use. I believe there was a study showing a minute increase in risk of sarcoma in kids getting growth hormone injections. Which is why pediatric endocrilogists are lot more restrictive these days prescribing growth hormones than maybe 7 years ago. At least in my country.

People lose muscle mass as they age as well. That is why the risk of falling (and not being able to get up) is high among the elderly.

Yes but this is mostly treatable by simply continuing to exercise and perhaps supplementing with creatine as you get older. There is no real way to prevent cartilage wearing down.

One of the major reasons that people lose muscle mass as they age is due to arthritis making it difficult to exercise. If there was a treatment for cartilage wear then elderly people could more easily stave off muscle loss by working out more.

I’d love this. My meniscus exploded at one point and was surprised to find out ligaments are treatable but meniscus replacement most often means a new knee.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29470784

Lab meat is a technology that has more funding and institutional backers and in my opinion, if a breakthrough occurs, it'll be in that domain first.

And by the looks of it, we're still a few years away from the real deal.

This is basically spongey glue (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogel) not really synthetic tissue. They're porous to provide a matrix or scaffold for cells to grow in, but this one is resilient enough to hold up in areas of high repeated mechanical stress. I wouldn't think lab meat would be an analog because it would lack the desired mechanical properties. Maybe if lab meat growers were were able to quickly breed a person's own induced pluripotent stem cells and seed the hydrogel with them?

How is this different than Biocardia (BCDA)? Curious because I took a flyer on it when a MD told me this was only thing he's seen which can repair hear muscle.

Is there substance behind it? BCDA became a WSB meme stock at some point.

Are there any real-life scenarios that make use of these synthetic tissues, or are all of this still not available for the masses?

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